Why not just save the money and not include the extra RAM?

honey the codewitch

I have a Wio Terminal. It's a little $40 IoT widget that has 192kB of SRAM in it. It *also* ostensibly has 4MB of PSRAM. However, there is no documentation on using this extra PSRAM. The last post reply on their support forum was 2 years ago. There are no samples, either from them, or from 3rd parties that I can find that use this PSRAM, anywhere on github or elsewhere for that matter. What's the point of spending the money to have 4MB of RAM in your device if you're not going to take half an hour and at least produce a sample that uses it? Why spend the money? It just floors me that people think they can release products without documentation, put up a few youtube videos and call it done.

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David ONeil

honey the codewitch wrote:

What's the point of spending the money to have 4MB of RAM in your device

Marketing.

honey the codewitch wrote:

if you're not going to take half an hour and at least produce a sample that uses it?

Idiot management.

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honey the codewitch

You're not wrong! Grrr!

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ElectronProgrammer

David O'Neil wrote:

Idiot management

Or because they couldn't. Many years ago I bought a small board (do not remember the seller name) for the ram and it wasn't even connected (there were no PCB traces going to it), it was just glued on some free space of their previous board revision :omg: Easy money for them. Idiots us who bought it.

lmoelleb

Option 1: The device becomes popular and people will start hacking away. Sooner or later someone will figure out how to access the PSRAM and you just saved the time it takes to write samples (which is more than half an hour - could easily be several hours) Option 2: The device turns out not being very popular, and you just saved the investment in making examples. Of course, one could argue that documentation is required (well, helpful) )for a device to become successful, but why make things complicated when the other options are easier for management to understand in a PowerPoint?

honey the codewitch

Well, the thing is a couple years old at least, so I believe I'm stuck with option 2. :sigh:

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trønderen

In the "supermini" days, I was working for a small company making a VAX competitor. The company didn't have the development resources to design different models. But the market demanded a "range" - entry-level alternatives, top-range alternatives. So the question came up: How to differentiate, when the core machine is identical in all the alternatives? This was in the pre-RISC days. CISC CPUs were microcoded, and this machine loaded its microcode from the disk as part of the boot process. So one proposal that was seriously considered was to make an entry level model by inserting wait cycles in the microcode, hardware 100% identical to the higher models. It didn't end up that way, though. Cache memory was extremely expensive. Removing the cache saved about 40,000 Euro in component costs, roughly halving the CPU speed, so that alternative was chosen. For the top range model, the machine was delivered in a twin cabinet, with lots of space for I/O cards (this was essential for lots of customers), and possibly small, internal disks. The CPU was identical in speed and functionality to the mid range model. I taught a course in programming these machines, and one of the participants got furious when I told that the top range model was no faster than the mid range model: She threatened to sue the company for fraud; they had spent the extra money for the top model to get the fastest CPU available, and it turns out to be a waste! Another "one size fits all"-solution employed by this company: The machine had a hidden disk, not visible to the customer, containing the full suite of proprietary software. When a customer bought some software, it was distributed on a 360K floppy containing the license key, which was a decrypt key for copying the software from the hidden disk to the ordinary working disk. (This obviously was before the internet, so the alternative would have been to ship the software on 42 floppies.) So, my guess is that the extra RAM may be there for some other use of the same design; the manufacturer maintains a single design, a single production line. Maybe the other use is a completely different product. Maybe there was a planned product never making it to the market, that would be using this RAM. Hardware sometimes is like software: I am certain that at least 50%, but most likely 80-90%, of the Microsoft Office code has never been executed on my PC and never will. But MS won't make a special MSO edition for me, with only the functions I use. You have a piece of hardware with components you

Daniel Pfeffer

My theory: The memory is faulty or otherwise unusable. Sticking it on a board and sending it out to customers is cheaper than disposing of it according to environmental regulations. :-\

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.

honey the codewitch

trønderen wrote:

my guess is that the extra RAM may be there for some other use

Honestly I doubt it if only because they advertise it prominently. I think it's far more likely that they just suck at documenting their products. I've run into a lot of IoT boards like that. Some I'm even had to throw away.

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Lost User

My experience is that the hardware gets developed before the software / firmware. The "next" version is then based on what you learned the first time around. Repeat.

"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I

trønderen

You haven't requested/obtained the information from the manufacturer on how to use this RAM. So you think the RAM shouldn't be there. I fully recognize your opinion that the RAM shouldn't be there. That doesn't imply that I agree with you.

trønderen

Gerry Schmitz wrote:

My experience is that the hardware gets developed before the software / firmware

You are probably right, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. I've seen a couple of cases where software guys were brought into the middle of hardware development, with an unquestionable positive effect on the hardware design. Unfortunately, the situation as you describe it is much more common.

honey the codewitch

I have indeed, and I've exhausted every available contact avenue I have had with them. I don't think it shouldn't be there. I think it should have been documented.

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honey the codewitch

There will never be a "next version" of this device.

Real programmers use butterflies