Yeah, I know this we played with all possible register settings also 
The problem comes when there is a high load in the USB-A socket of CHIP (possibly an SDR with big puffer caps) during startup of AXP209 it causing some serious transients / overload effects (still not sure what happens just evaluated with oscilloscope) and after several trials AXP209 shut down instead of finishing startup process⌠
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Just curious, what caused you to choose the AXP209 again over other power management chips, given these limitations? It has a ton of features for the price, so is it worth working around these issues because of that?
Oh, one more thought. I looked on the A13 datasheet and see only one SD card interface. I assume the other SD card will be using the SPI bus. Is that right? If so, what is the maximum memory that can be used on the second SD card?
stoked , can we buy a pre-release board ?
Sadly, the pre-release boards are really limited in supplyâbasically just enough for us to hammer on. But we are acquiring parts for a 1k production run, so there should be plenty to go around.
@Tysonpower What do you think would be a normal price for such a product?
I absolutely have no idea xD
MY guess:
$45 for SDrx + $10 CHIP + buffer for other things on the board = 60$ ?
regards,
Manuel
AXP209 is an excellent power management chip, very often used with Allwinner CPUs in chipset. Itâs designed mainly for tablets and smartphones. I think itâs important understanding that (for example our Dreamcatcher or CHIP) is not a smartphone⌠You can use your smartphone for OTG but usually put there pendrives with 80mA load not current hungry SDRs for example. So we kept this in mind while designing Dreamcatcher.
Iâm not sure that the AXP209 has big issues but the particular application was not fine tuned for that environment (IMHO). Donât know numbers but possibly that sold already in several million devices so should be reliable within spec.
Other important thing is time to market so ânever touch a working systemâ 
Starting evaluations and new runs with other power management chips could cause months of delays.
No, A13 has two high speed SD card controller, check datasheet page 8, â2.9 External peripheralsâ topic
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Sadly, if we sold it for $60, then we would need to stop feeding the birds (and I donât think anyone wants that )
There are a few other things that impact the MSRP, the first being that a $10 CHIP does not seem to be a naturally occurring physical phenomenon. My opinion is that if it was, then we would all be able to easily buy them at that price. For example, the Raspberry Pi Zero, which had a stated price of $5, but virtually no availability. I was told by manufacturing insiders that the Zero was simply a marketing ploy in response to the $9 CHIP. I think NTC won that round, since they shipped a few hundred thousand CHIPs, but now I digress.
And of course there are the additional features that are available on Dreamcatchers, as described above. Lastly, we need to make sure there is margin for our distributors and resellers, otherwise everyone outside of the US ends up paying $25 for shippingâand no guarantee when the item will be received (because it goes through the postal service).
Another thing to keep in mind is that a healthy margin allows us to continue to develop new features, iterations, and products. For example, wouldnât it be nice if there was a new software-defined transceiver on the marketâthat cost a fraction of the HackRF?
When you want to add something to the SDR market you should not focus on low price but rather
on better performance. That includes using a better A/D converter than the RTL2838.
There are some usable devices appearing on the market but usually there is a long time between
announcements and crowdfunding activity and the actual availability of devices.
This makes it difficult to select.
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What does it do? Why have a speaker if it receiving data from outernet?
I think the speaker is only for size comparision.
A/D would be a pretty interesting point for us too! Anyone can come up with an inexpensive but better A/D then RTL2832 with drop-in replacement?
no, itâs should work in real with 1.4 W on board audio PA
I donât think so⌠those RTL2832 are for DVB-T and DAB reception and are designed for the strong
signals that those transmissions usually have.
For good performance you would need an entirely different chip that has a better A/D (more bits) and
it would not be compatible.
A wellknown chip is the AD9364 dual-channel and its brother the AD9361 single-channel chip.
They have a significantly higher price point that makes them unsuitable for devices like the Outernet
receiver.
Other chips like this that are cheaper are appearing, and lots of âproductsâ are designed around them.
Actual products that you can order and receive are a bit scarcer. But it is changing.
what I am thinking is when you made your own board that opens up opportunity to beef up the specs of the man CPU and ram removing the issues with the current single board computer like moving to 1gig of ram or something crazy making the board future proof and at the same point removing points of failure like preventing the overheating failure of some chips have.
Syed,
Iâd be happy to pay $149 for that board if it had 512MB RAM. I just donât think 256MB is going to be enough. Linux uses spare RAM as disk cache which would help performance and possibly reduce wear on the SD cards. Also, you already know based on a lot of field testing that 512MB RAM works well so why change it? I canât imagine the difference in component price is that much.
Are the LEDs connected to PWM outputs? It would be cool to get levels of brightness to indicate different things.
i have to agree with kf4hzu on this it needs the ram and why lower it if anything increase it so you can use a better CPU and use the ram for some more better compression software to pack more data for the 30mb of total BW a day that you have and another idea i had is if you are still using the same cpu why not still offer the system as it is now with a chip and the SDrx or the RTL-SDR dongle to allow the older systems to keep working or even the more custom compact systems/ cheaper systems to keep on operating allowing the 2 ways of operation and if i had time and wanted to fight with getting the entire skylark system compiled to run on rasbian again i would love to take up that project but that would mean work of compiling software again to work with the RPI system. also another through i had if you have the two Antenna connections what if you could use 2 L-Band Antenna in tandem to get a stronger signal in the worse areas or even have 2 active streams of data.
You make a good point. After all of this feedback, there is a very strong likelihood that 512MB will be included on the board. PWM is available in the GPIO forest. Somewhat related to your comment about level of brights: we have 4 blue LEDs specifically to indicate SNR.
Woot I made a good point 
Good stuff on the PWM and lights. What do you think of $149 for the retail price point of the Dreamcatcher? I have no idea what your costs are but most companies build in 40% to 60% margin from landed cost which may seem high to some consumers but it is the only way to stay viable long-term as you likely already know.
I think if you could get the board, antenna and power supply priced in a $199 package that would be nice. Maybe run an ad campaign âOnly $199 to sponsor a remote village with OuterNet forever!â or something.
Now thatâs a great idea - - âSponsor a Remote Villageâ campaign. I could see many of us contributing to such a program, and even traveling at our own expense to do a setup. Ken
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@kf4hzu Thanks for understanding what it takes to keep the lights on. I think the $149 MSRP is fair. It provides margin for us as well as local resellers. Your margin figures are not too far off from what I see in the industry. Of course, the touchy point for us is that we want to make the radio at the lowest possible price, so that more people can buy them. But that will only be possible at real volume. Sadly, even 10,000 units is not considered real volume in the consumer electronics industry.
Do you think itâs really important that we provide a power supply? It just seems like everyone has a 1A microUSB charger these days.
We will be selling the following antenna (new style) starting in April.
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