What's Up, LeafLabs? « LeafLabs Garden

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What's Up, LeafLabs?

(6 posts) (6 voices)

Started 2 years ago by robodude666
Latest reply from Adam

robodude666
Member

Hey!

This is yet another "State Of the Leaf" thread.

So, we know that people behind LeafLabs are still alive, because there was a blog post two days ago about making more Maples, and there is libmaple github activity in the past two weeks, and three months, and four months, as well as activity with other LeafLabs github repos... So we know from that, that some people behind LeafLabs care about the company, and are still working on new stuff. But the question on everyone's mind is:

What's up?

There is clear activity on the forums, which means your community still cares about LeafLabs, the Maple, libmaple, and STM32. I know that keeping secrets works for Apple, but it doesn't work very well for smaller companies, especially those that live off of a small ecosystem that's focused around them -- especially when multiple community members point out poor communication, and the company itself agrees. The last public announcement from LeafLabs about what's going on was on February 1st, almost three months ago.

Are you still in the same boat? No new future products, but just maintaining Maple and libmaple? No STM32 F4 support or boards? No new STM32F407ZE-based Maple Native II like planned?

I bought my first Maple back in February of 2011, and then bought a Maple Mini right after it came out, and a Maple Native right when it got into Beta. It's been a joy working with LeafLabs, Maple, and libmaple. It's been the only platform that I've worked with that I actually liked, and enjoyed using. The boards were very well designed, and a lot of thought was put into libmaple to make it clean, straight forward, organized, and very well documented.

I hope you do change your minds, and share some top-secret information.

Love,
-robodude666

Posted 2 years ago #
bnewbold
Ex-Leaflabs

Hey robodude666,

There isn't much top-secret information to share. We aren't working on any new Maple devices or hardware revisions. All of our previous work towards new boards is available on github (eg, Maple II, but we are not work on those any more, and don't have plans to do so in the future. I'd been hoping to update the IDE toolchain and move the codebase over to Wiring (and this shouldn't be too much work) but based on the past two months of workload I don't think it's going to happen. mbolivar continues to accept libmaple bugfixes and patches, and we all still reply to support emails.

We all really love the Maple product line and the community that grew up around it, but were never able to make a stable business model work. That isn't to say it's impossible to make money developing and selling devices like the Maple and live a happily healthy life, but it wasn't working for us, so we are spending our time doing contract engineering instead. I think we want to make it work "some day", so we've kept the door open to future development.

Getting the existing designs manufactured and distributed at a slowly growing volume doesn't take much time and pays for itself (with profits going back in to the next batch), so we'll keep doing that indefinitely.

HTH, Love,
--bryan

Posted 2 years ago #
tlgosser
Member

I only have 1 word for you: "INTERN".

Just get some college kid to do it for free in exchange for school credit. That's the great American tradition. The lack of updates and leaflabs activity is putting people off.

I really like the Maple so I hope you stay with it.

--tlgosser

Posted 2 years ago #
feurig
Member

Oh come on! They have already off-shored production to cut costs, They should go for for CCA sponsorship and prison labor. Better word "INMATE".

One of the biggest issues with open source is where the actual labor comes from. This is what they are dealing with. Also adding inexperienced programmers to a relatively complicated code base will only require more oversight and increase rather than decrease that issue.

A lot of the work could be done by the community however what has been consistently missing is documentation on the direction that Maple wants to move the software and a cleaner mechanism for community addition/participation (realize the failed wiring merge is largely the issue here). If you took the existing model and the stable hardware and allowed the community to steer the ide you might get some of these issues resolved as well as having a platform to incubate better hardware (like f3 based derivatives)

Bnewbold,
I hope your team (seems like a team of 1 nowadays) will be attending the Open Hardware Summit http://2013.oshwa.org/ in september (If not giving a talk on some of these issues). You could probably use this summit to brainstorm with members of the community.

Posted 2 years ago #
gbulmer
Moderator

I agree with feurig on the use of an Intern.
It's probably a bit old fashioned to some, but that doesn't stop it being accurate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

The author, Fred Brooks, was in charge of developing IBM's Operating System OS/360 in the '60's. He chose to add a lot of lower-skill staff to a late project, and discovered it made things much worse.

Edit: If there are folks who "qualify" as interns, and who are already up-to-speed on the guts of Maple, libmaple or STM32F C/C++ development, then they might be able to push Maple software forward. However, I don't think we should assume they are a low-cost option because, as feurig wrote, they will need help and support from LeafLabs and the community.

Google summer of code?

Posted 2 years ago #
Adam
Member

Thanks for the update Bryan. I really appreciate the Leaf Labs team's hard work on this platform - it's been fun to use. I am sorry it's not working out from a business standpoint. Thank you also for the straight answer.

Posted 2 years ago #

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