| ??? 09/18/09 13:50 Read: times |
#168958 - Sometimes it gives you insight Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Per Westermark said:
I have received a number of free boards and complete starter kits too.
It helps if the distributor knows that the potential product will ship in significant volumes, but sometimes they can give out free boards to students too, knowing that a student well acquainted with a specific chip will sell in that chip when they get their first job. And at least in Sweden, a large percent of companies are quite small, so there may be one to three developers. Small is vulnerable, but small also means that it can be easier to sell in a new product because of the smaller momentum within the organisation. When I was a student, there were no microprocessors, microcontrollers, and precious little integrated logic. Nobody gave me anything to "play" with when I was a student. Even today, at least half of the "evaluation" boards I encounter either don't work as specified, or flatly don't work at all. Some of them are so stupidly designed that it's too painful trying to figure out how to apply them to anything that would demonstrate the value of the product they represent, even to connect them to power. Some years back, I received one ALTERA CPLD eval board that had 36-pin IDC headers on each side of the IC, placed in such a way that, had there been commercially available 36-pin ICD connectors, they wouldn't have fit on the board. I've received "demo" boards with I/O's located such that the only way to use them would have ruled out using the adjacent one. Would YOU use a product from a firm that produces such rubbish? Does that tell you anything about the company itself? RE |
