No support at all, right ?

[Lirezh]

I received by boards recently and I am more than a bit frustrated by the lack of support.
Comparing to the beagle I might actually send the boards back.

While I am aware the product is new and the sale count is comperatively low thats no excuse for this minimalistic product support.
Or is LiME already dead and all the effort goes into A20 ?

For example, no code to find for it. Not even some basic examples in C or anything.
Searching for a header description (pinout) for 10 minutes, nothing found.

The support website for the Lime consists of a few pages in a row...
It would need a professional wiki/knowledgebase.

Is there a future for the A10 Lime, or did I put my money on the wrong horse ?

[dave-at-axon]

Have to agree to some extent that although Olimex produce some very nice hardware at great prices, the documentation is very poor in a lot of cases as can be seen from the number of postings in the forum.

I received by boards recently and I am more than a bit frustrated by the lack of support.
Comparing to the beagle I might actually send the boards back.

While I am aware the product is new and the sale count is comperatively low thats no excuse for this minimalistic product support.
Or is LiME already dead and all the effort goes into A20 ?

For example, no code to find for it. Not even some basic examples in C or anything.

There seems to be a very lack of anything native code wise for any of the boards as most people are running and OS on them, be it Android or Debian or something else. All of the examples you will find are written to run under some kind of OS where most of the hardware is supported (some of it is not supported such as SPI or PWM out of the box)

Searching for a header description (pinout) for 10 minutes, nothing found.

For the pinouts you can check in the Wiki here. This is the boards schematic and all you need is in there.

https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/blob/master/HARDWARE/A10-OLinuXino-LIME/A10-OLinuXino-Lime_Rev_B.pdf

The support website for the Lime consists of a few pages in a row...
It would need a professional wiki/knowledgebase.

Is there a future for the A10 Lime, or did I put my money on the wrong horse ?

If you are the type of person who likes to hack things and work it out then stick with it. If you are the type that wants all the code to be ready to go then I would choose something like Beagleboard although the black is almost impossible to get in anything other than 1 offs, if you can find someone with stock that is.

I've stuck with the A20 now for about 8 weeks and after figuring out Android (their supposedly source didn't even work) and the lack of good Olimex docs, I now have an embedded system that runs nice and stable.

You basically need to cross back and forth from a number of places and docs to get what you need.

Good luck if you stick with it.

[JohnS]

I suppose it depends what is meant by "support".  Olimex make boards for developers and they can normally support themselves except when (say) a board is faulty - which doesn't seem often.  For more support the reality is it costs money so either buy more expensive boards or very high volume like RPi.  Or pay someone to do what you want in a timescale that you want.

Many things ARE in the doc (or on other parts of the net) but you have to go looking - something developers do all the time.

I guess Olimex could hire another 10 support people and put up all their prices.  Wouldn't suit me but YMMV.

I'm not sure 10 would be enough - just look at the range of questions being asked on here, from people who can't even find a package that IS in a repo or can't figure how to set up a toolchain right through to not understanding that 5V on a 3.3V chip may be bad.

John

[Lirezh]

To make a proper presentation and software package you do not need 10 people.

You need one developer and one simple webdesigner hired for 2-3 months to release a proper working linux version and make a proper website with well organized information.
It might still have bugs, it might still lack a lot of information but it would be a solid base to start with.

Think about the amount of work required to make a proper presentation, it is not that insanely high.
And then look at what we received.
A single blog-like website with a few unsorted random chunks of information and a forum, left on our own to be happy or rot on the amount of information.

That is not how a successful project is launched, that's why I also strongly doubt the LIME will have a bright future.


With the amount of information I collected in 4 hours frustration and my knowledge of webdesign I could already create a much better online presentation with a lot more information than what is available now.


I will send the boards I ordered back.
The final decision fell after I tried to use the network, I have a reproduceable stall/crash when I insert a LAN cable after 10-20 seconds (during that time I am online, then the lights go off and input stalls).
I was really high on hopes on the LIME which were quite destroyed by the presentation of information and software.

[JohnS]

What you specifically list is what you want but it isn't suitable for everyone, just look at the range of questions being asked.  So your overall comment about time is wildly wrong.

You must of course do whatever you wish and I wish you luck with whatever other boards you choose.  I'm wondering what happened in your process of buying this board... you looked at its details, its web page and related data, and bought, then I suppose someone deleted all the stuff you now want?

John

[olimex]

Hi
all code and templates are on GitHub, probably bad organized as really need some efforts to find them, but any suggestions are welcome

https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/tree/master/SOFTWARE

most of the examples are for A13 but they should run "as is" on other boards too

Tsvetan

[Kreega]

Hi
all code and templates are on GitHub, probably bad organized as really need some efforts to find them, but any suggestions are welcome

I can't do it myself right now, if ever, but it's possible that someone could do these steps

1. git clone https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/tree/master/SOFTWARE

2. organize things locally

3. git push to own github account

4. send a pull request to olimex

olimex has to
1. git pull new organized code into a new repo