[Ardour-Dev] Funding: Build and Sell Hardware

[Dan Mills]

On Wed, 2009-01-21 at 04:09 +0700, Hans Baier wrote: 
> My idea is building a piece of hardware like that:
> 
> Take expresscard, put in a number of ICE1712
> and some nice DAC/ADC together with a MIDI chip,
> (perhaps make it modular to being able to add more ICEs, if needed),
> find someone in China, Malaysia (or I can find one here in Indonesia)
> who assembles it.

Funny, I actually have a similar project for another application in the
works, but the day job keeps getting in the way. 

If doing things with PCI-e and envy24s you will need a PCIe->PCI bridge
to convert to a standard pci bus for the chips, so it might be that a
FPGA is a better approach. I ended up going down the PCI 104 and Envy24
route, but am thinking that the next prototype will use a computer on
module instead. PCI 104 only has 3 bus mastering circuits which puts
quite a crimp in channel count unless you do the PCI bridge thing (Which
is a pain in the arse). 

I am not sure that hardware for the low end market is really viable
unless you can move huge volumes, so you pretty much have to go after
the sort of niche that the IZ Radar II occupied (And that means more
then just 'good' AD and DA). 

Regards, Dan.