MENU

Crowdfunding: the new marketing tactic for design-in

Crowdfunding: the new marketing tactic for design-in

Feature articles |
By eeNews Europe



 This is not so much for the money (in fact the flexible goal means that the campaign will receive all funds even if the goal is not reached) because the company will go ahead with the project regardless of external contributions, but mostly a trending marketing tactic among even the most established silicon vendors.

Set yourself a low goal (the board will probably cost more to develop than the actual pledge in that case) and assume this as a small advertising fee necessary to reach out the strong community of makers and hobbyists gathering around tech crowdfunding platforms, and pick their brains about what the full product ought to feature.

The CleO TFT display board is a follow up from the company’s previous crowdfunding project, NerO which only raised £2,463 on competing crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter.

The main driver for these campaigns, according to FTDI Chip’s CEO and Founder, Fred Dart, is to allow professional and amateur engineers to play a part in the project.

Talking about CleO campaign, its generous purpose is to bring to market a family of intelligent, simple to program TFT display boards for engineers from all horizons and skill levels to design human machine interfaces. The first Arduino-based hardware of the CleO series promotes the company’s FT810 GPU and FT903 32-bit RISC MCU to support HVGA 320×480 pixel resolution 3.5” format TFT displays with a resistive touchscreen.


What could make CleO an interesting design-in silicon placement tool for novice engineers is that it does not require any prior knowledge of complex graphics programming or mathematical algorithms.

Engineers, students and hobbyists are promised an extensive support tutorial, including 20 chapters covering over 80 different programming topics combined with 20 fun DIY example projects.

 

“Though Arduino units have provision for inclusion of a display element, in many cases it will be necessary to connect the display to the outside world, so that data can be acquired from sensors, actuators, switches and various communication mechanisms, “ stated Fred Dart, FTDI Chip’s CEO and Founder. “Having so many different tasks to address will put a lot of strain on the UNO architecture. However, via CleO, a large proportion of the heavier computational tasks can be offloaded, not just the HMI, but also file system, camera and sound output can all be taken care of. This means that more exciting and ambitious Arduino design projects may be embarked upon, while still having access to the vast scope of shields and supporting documentation that accompanies Arduino UNO.”

 

Indiegogo backers will be able to get FTDI Chip’s CleO at a special discounted unit price of $49/£35 (~25% off the retail price).

Check out the Indiegogo campaign

 

Related news:

Imagination Technologies leverages kickstarter for IoT kit launch

FTDI Kickstarter Project: NerO provides Arduino UNO R3 compatibility

If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :    eeNews on Google News

Share:

Linked Articles
10s