My apologies to Tibbo (maybe)

[dhouston]

Clearly you had an issue with the end of life of a product...

Perhaps you've forgotten, but I had placed an order with you for 25pcs EM202. After hearing nothing for 2-3 weeks, I contacted Crownhill. It took another week or two to learn (from you) that the EM202 was discontinued. Clearly, you were as blind-sided as I was.

Tibbo seems to be more engineering driven than market driven. For example, the EM500 web page has said (since it was introduced)...

In the near future, the EM500 will also support Wi-Fi communications (using the GA1000 add-on board), as well as external LCD, keypad, and flash disk (via an SPI flash IC).

After a year, it still hadn't happened, even though it was obviously a very simple matter as it was firmware and two of their other modules already had it. And, it apparently only took a few days to complete after I asked for an availability estimate and got the not this year response. So why did it take more than a year to do?

I'm not knocking their quality nor their design skills (the EM500 is truly impressive) although I think they are missing a bet in not adding more MCU-like functions (e.g. timers, capture & compare, etc.) as their raw computing power appears to be an order of magnitude or more beyond that of the MCUs (PICs, AVRs, etc.) that they need to be paired with.

In fact, if they do follow through, I'll complete a design that uses the EM500/GA1000 despite my bad experience.