Re: Presale (24h LEFT) : 80 BenBoost first come first served. 11.50$ + 2.50SH CDN
RHD and Ben should have never released these without full testing.
"
Released" is a strange way to say it, since neither of us ever sold any of these drivers. We "released" the design, in the sense that we made it open for everyone to critique, so perhaps the phrase fits. I suppose I would be more sympathetic to your comment about whether we should have released this or not, had it been some sort of closed-source product. But the reality is that this was a design that we put out there, openly/transparently/freely for members to hammer away at. The fact that this didn't really happen, kind of shocks me to be honest.
Neither Ben nor I are in a position to "
fully" test anything. There are very few members of this community with the resources (financial or technological) to "
fully" test a product/design/component etc. Maybe Jerry and a few others with semi-commercial enterprises can do that, but this is a driver that we put out there free for everyone to use, test, build, revise, and improve upon.
It was never meant to be "ours", it was meant to be "everyone's".
Maybe we should have
"released it" to only a small handful of members to pound on, instead of giving it to the forum as a whole. Maybe we should have "
released" it to the vets section only. That would have been one approach to take. Though had we done it that way, there would have been a ton of members, new, old, novice, and vet alike, complaining about "elitism", "favoritism", and all sorts of crazy stuff like that.
So it feels very lose-lose. You try to do something positive, and people complain that it (maybe) wasn't as refined as it could have been (though the jury is still out on whether there's really a problem or not).
There were a whole number of neat little trinkets, circuits, and devices that I had intended to give to the forum as "open hardware" type items. But I don't think LPF has the maturity to handle an open-sourced hardware endeavor. I've said before that we should have seen 50 of these manufactured, tested, revisions made, and then another 50 made, tested, etc etc etc. This design should have been iterated beyond the 17 (?) revisions that Ben and I made before giving it to the forum. But with the exception of ADDING a feature or two, I don't think any actual usage or testing-derived feedback has made it back into the design, to this day. Many people here
take take take, and very few
give give give - and that's the poison pill for any project that is meant to be collaborative, open, and community guided.