To talk briefly about one item here, embedded systems dev kits;
They strike me as a ludicrous 'pay to play' scheme. The old standard is that you have to buy a $2500 dev kit for every developers, and that standard has kept the individuals and enthusiasts out. OEM's ought have full design files for multiple reference board available, and sell implementations for something like cost.
Much of this trenchant multi-level commercialism (developer kit company, silicon company) was natural for the way the software tooling used to work; one off debugging interfaces (also frequently $1000+) talking to each vendor's proprietary compilation/debugging toolchain, booting each vendor's own bootcode and running drivers developed by the vendor.
Thankfully the open source stack is getting better. Another commenter discussed a sustainable bicycle part company ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2629346 ), and I see a similar parallel in that chip companies ought be investing in sustainable openly accessible tooling. SoC and high speed serial radically simplify many aspects of board design, chip companies ought be actively promoting the other side of easy accessibility & be working to produce open source drivers, facilitate tool support from the likes of OpenOCD, uBoot, &c, and doing every thing they can to reduce barriers to entry.
True but the situation is improving. A lot of the latest crop of ARM-based dev kits are around $100-$300 and come with complete schematics. Full-featured, size limited toolchains tend to be available for free so it's pretty easy to assess what you would get for your $1000-$1500 investment.
Eclipse-GCC-GDB with open-source JTAG dongles is a great way to get started for very little investment. So is Arduino for the lower end.
The big investement tends to be around high-end debug tools like trace probes and debuggers. It would be great to have an open-source trace probe for Cortex.
They strike me as a ludicrous 'pay to play' scheme. The old standard is that you have to buy a $2500 dev kit for every developers, and that standard has kept the individuals and enthusiasts out. OEM's ought have full design files for multiple reference board available, and sell implementations for something like cost.
Much of this trenchant multi-level commercialism (developer kit company, silicon company) was natural for the way the software tooling used to work; one off debugging interfaces (also frequently $1000+) talking to each vendor's proprietary compilation/debugging toolchain, booting each vendor's own bootcode and running drivers developed by the vendor.
Thankfully the open source stack is getting better. Another commenter discussed a sustainable bicycle part company ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2629346 ), and I see a similar parallel in that chip companies ought be investing in sustainable openly accessible tooling. SoC and high speed serial radically simplify many aspects of board design, chip companies ought be actively promoting the other side of easy accessibility & be working to produce open source drivers, facilitate tool support from the likes of OpenOCD, uBoot, &c, and doing every thing they can to reduce barriers to entry.