[Freedombox-discuss] Iomega iConnect lessons for FreedomBox

[Thomas Lord]

So, we seem to need to make our own
hardware (probably, miracles happen).  

I noticed the BeagleBoard project:

   http://beagleboard.org/brief

It might be a good starting point even if
their current board is not quite right.

Are there others?

They make open hardware plans and free software
(and sell kits) for "a board based on the
highest performance ARM-based system-on-chip
available today, [....] small and powered via USB."

They say: "BeagleBoard.org is an all volunteer
activity started-up by a collection of passionate
individuals, including several employees of 
Texas Instruments, interested in creating powerful, 
open, and embedded devices. We invite you to
participate and become part of BeagleBoard.org, 
defining its direction."

As an aside, I noticed this nice touch:

"Instead of using a fixed, embedded LCD,
Gerald used the digital and analog LCD
ports to add monitor/TV connections, so
that any DVI-D enabled monitor or S-Video
enabled TV could be used."

The kit is far too expensive.  They currently
sell for $125 BUT, if you try to order 26 
or more of them, the order form refuses and
tells you to call to negotiate a price.

-t



John wrote:
> The box must be *useful* and *cheap*
and
> If your hardware isn't rock-solid, or your 
> firmware isn't rock-solid,
> then don't ship it to ordinary people yet.

Well, right away we are in trouble *if* we assume
that some nice vendors will luckily come along
and happen to start selling plug computers onto which we
can load FreedomBox software and re-sell.





On Wed, 2011-03-23 at 18:46 -0800, John Gilmore wrote:
> Consumer electronics maker Iomega is shipping an "iConnect" box with
> similar electronics to the ShevaPlug.  But unlike the GlobalScale
> team, they seem to have done some marketing.  We can learn from them:
> 
>   http://go.iomega.com/en-us/products/network-storage-desktop/wireless-data-station/network-hard-drive-iconnect/
> 
> It has the same hardware inside it as the ShevaPlug, basically, but
> they thought about what people might want to use it for, and aimed the
> hw/sw design at a particular market: cheap NAS and printer sharing.
> In every other product, NAS (network addressable storage) always seems
> to cost a minimum of $1000 more than the disk drives; here it's $65
> more.  I bet they're selling more of them than the "plug computer"
> guys.  It's cheaper than the plugs, has WiFi-N, and doesn't overheat.
> You can get it from Amazon for $64.29 with free shipping:
> 
>   http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0035JCI6M/
> 
> There are 92 customer reviews in Amazon, averaging out to 3 stars out
> of 5.  But the reviews are instructive.  They're quite skewed: 30
> 5-star reviews, 35 1-star reviews, and only 9 each for 2, 3, or 4
> stars.  It seems likely that:
> 
>   *  They had some early infant-mortality problems that would hang the
>      box with a blinking blue light.  Later firmware, or perhaps
>      improved manufacturing QA, have reduced this.
> 
>   *  People who want to use it for wired disk sharing (NAS) tend to
>      love it, though they complain about a few bugs or limitations,
>      such as with multiple partitions on the attached drives.  Its
>      speed is limited by the USB2 interface to the drives, and by its
>      CPU, which both seem to be slower than the GigE.  Mac-formatted
>      drives tended to get corrupted.  Time Machine worked fine for some,
>      never worked at all for others, worked initially for some and then
>      reported drive corruption within a week.
> 
>   *  People who used its WiFi tend to be disappointed.  For many it
>      didn't work at all, wouldn't even connect to their network.  For
>      others, they expected high speed and didn't get it.
> 
>   *  People who wanted to share a printer over it tend to lose.  It seems
>      to only support a limited set of printers.
> 
>   *  Windows clients are better supported than Mac; Mac better than Linux.
>      Though all are supported, some are more equal than others, and the
>      documentation was extremely limited and poor.  Blog entries from
>      other users provided better documentation than the official stuff.
> 
>   *  Iomega's phone/email tech support was not helpful to most
>      commenters, often leading them to give up and return it (to
>      Amazon for a refund), or throw it away.
> 
> Here's a thorough press review of the iConnect, by a NAS guy who also
> knows the guts.  Note he takes major points off for the UX of the
> wireless (no LED, clunky config interface, especially compared to the
> rest of the config).  But, for him it WORKS with wireless, out of the
> box, which many NAS's don't:
> 
>   http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews/31094-iomega-iconnect-wireless-data-station-reviewed
> 
> The Freedom Box project can learn tons from this:
> 
>   *  To avoid consumer frustration, aim it to do one thing well, in one
>      environment.  Document that thing very well, up front, so that
>      people who try it for something else will be pre-warned that they
>      are unsupported experimenters.  Provide detailed documentation
>      for that one thing in all supported environments, and evolve the
>      doc to cope well with frequent misunderstandings or failure modes
>      among users.
> 
>      (When you've mastered that one thing, you can make the box do a
>      second useful thing.  Before then, keep the team focusing on
>      making that one thing work flawlessly for normal people.)
> 
>   *  The box must be *useful* and *cheap* at doing that one function,
>      to attract adopters.  A box that offers encrypted chat only to
>      others who have a box, isn't going to sell to any ordinary folks.
>      One that serves up disk drives on their network might.  This
>      "first niche" is something we'll have to think hard about,
>      because it will make or break our box.  Ideally it'll do
>      something that nobody else offers.  (Perhaps secure wide-area
>      network filesystem support, using NFSv4.1 or the Andrew File
>      System?)
> 
>   *  The more things that can "plug in" to your box, the more
>      configurations are likely to fail.  A box with a disk drive
>      inside it, with a known filesystem format, will be easier to make
>      reliable than a box that the user can plug any disk drive into,
>      with any PC, Mac, Linux, or USB-key filesystem format on it.
> 
>   *  Wired Ethernets are much easier to support than wireless (for
>      initial installation, ongoing debugging, and for product
>      performance).  Ethernet has had 40 years of engineering that have
>      made it almost impossible for consumers to screw it up these
>      days.  All the common failure methods have gradually been
>      engineered out, from shorts in sting-taps, to missing terminating
>      resistors, to loops in the network, to mismatched port speeds, to
>      cross-wired cables.  You can see it work (via the link/activity
>      LEDs in the jacks) and when it fails, those physical indicators
>      usually let you swap cables or switches til you isolate the
>      problem.  With WiFi, it's magic when it works, and magic when it
>      fails; there's no obvious debugging path.
> 
>   *  Solid tech support will be needed early, to avoid an early flood of
>      frustration and rejection among ordinary people trying to install it.
> 
>   *  If your hardware isn't rock-solid, or your firmware isn't rock-solid,
>      then don't ship it to ordinary people yet.
> 
> 	John
> 
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