I'm not a hardware guy, so this may be naive, but I wish there were an ATX-type standard for phone-sized embedded devices. A Raspberry Pi is about the size of a phone. MiniITX is old and too big.
The Pi doesn't have wireless -- you have to add that with USB. And then they have this add-on camera module, and a compute board too. Lots of people appear to be adding hi-fi amps and DACs as well to the Pi.
It doesn't feel like USB is really the right solution. With USB, you run into some mechanical problems like flash thumb drives being too wide and blocking more than one port.
I feel like an ATX-type standard would be appropriate to address this problem, and let other manufacturers specialize and compete with different SOCs and peripherals for embedded devices. It seems like some of the expertise from Project Ara would transfer over to this. But I don't know that there's any economic incentive to work on it. Intel or IBM would may be a better steward of such a project.
Mechanical problems with USB thumb drives are not caused by USB itself but by manufacturers that ignore mechanical specification of USB connector and it's surrounding space. On the other hand, there are many protocol-level reasons why USB is not good interface for essentially any kind of device, especially when you take cellphone-style power management into account.
Well, if the Ara ecosystem takes off, it could lead us in that direction.
A modular system to build any computing device you need. Remove the battery and put it on mains power. Replace the GSM radio module with ethernet. Install an ssh server, then pop off the screen. Who ever said you had to build a phone?
The Pi doesn't have wireless -- you have to add that with USB. And then they have this add-on camera module, and a compute board too. Lots of people appear to be adding hi-fi amps and DACs as well to the Pi.
It doesn't feel like USB is really the right solution. With USB, you run into some mechanical problems like flash thumb drives being too wide and blocking more than one port.
I feel like an ATX-type standard would be appropriate to address this problem, and let other manufacturers specialize and compete with different SOCs and peripherals for embedded devices. It seems like some of the expertise from Project Ara would transfer over to this. But I don't know that there's any economic incentive to work on it. Intel or IBM would may be a better steward of such a project.