Kickstarter faq says Mycroft 2 will be based on “Xilinx - Zynq UltraScale + MPSoC EG” with Bluetooth. A few forum posts from a year ago agree with that. More recent Blog posts here are less clear. Is the major hardware component selection finalized? Would you mind restating or updating here?
Additionally, i’d like to know if (and hope) there will be exposed ports like USB, gpio, spi, i2c.
Thanks, Mycroft team. Keep fighting the good fight.
Thanks, Jarbas. I knew I had read that somewhere, but my search skills failed me in rediscovering.
There are lots of good details in these posts, but I do not find a clear answer on external I/O ports. I see on the Rockchip 3229 product sheet that “USB,I2C/Uart/SPI” support is in the chip itself, but it would be nice to hear from Mycroft team if these will working and/or physically exposed.
Moreover, it has been nearly a year since that post. It wouldn’t hurt to hear an official: “yep, we stayed with RockChip 3229; we did not have to change again.”
In think the Mark2 dev-team moved from the RK3229 to Pine H64 in late summer 2019 and they are also evaluating the RPI4.
https://chat.mycroft.ai/community/pl/n9phc1qq1fgy7j6fqjymwko4qh
https://chat.mycroft.ai/community/pl/od1u133bsbb6ib34h3gp7w81eh
We will soon enough know, which route they take.
This was from the November update, so December should be month 1 and we are close to end of month 2.
Anyhow, guess we are only few days away from another update, so… 
IF they want to share of course, because they will be connecting the AFE board to the Rpi3 during further development. (If it runs on a rpi3, it will run better on whatever they choose by then)
Nothing set in stone yet. We’re currently heavily focused on software with the Raspberry Pi continuing to play the role of our prototype. @derick-mycroft is currently working on a hardware update for the community. Hardware is hard. Thanks for your patience.
Thank you for the update, @J_Montgomery_Mycroft . I appreciate the priority placed on quality; this was not meant to read like a complaint, just a request for updated information. There was a bit of information published in 2018 that disagreed/corrected what came before, but more recently, it has been less clear.
I think it might help to have an update to the Kickstarter FAQ now, indicating that the hardware platform is not yet finalized, and then another update once it is. And this post, too, has helped. Thank you all. Looking forward to the hardware update.
Where can we sign up for one of those very first AFE boards 
Would be great to start working on it / with it, so we have stuff ready as soon as the other parts become available or the Mark-2 itself.
@j1nx believes the 8 month Mark 2 production timeline started in December 2019 and therefore will finish in July 2020.
Can someone from Mycroft please confirm this is correct?
Assumptions the the mother of all F… Ups 
I wonder if they’ve tried on any of the Amlogic SoCs, such as S905X? Those tend to run pretty cool and are fairly well supported in upstream Linux. I run Mycroft on a H5 w/ 2GBs of RAM and it is generally a pretty good experience and with passive cooling stays at roughly 56° Celsius. Adding 2GBs of zramswap also gets you through the Mimic installation.
They tried a Xilinx based design (iirc Zynq 7k series), but that failed because their hardware partner could not deliver a stable system.
Then they tried a RK3229 based of-the-shelf SBC (Respeaker Core V2).
Current SBC candidates are Pine H64 and RPI4 - to my knowledge they experience OS/driver issues with that need to be ironed out in order to get ready for production.
The clock starts when we pull the trigger with our partner and write them the first check. We’re working on the financial side of this right now and are hoping to be able to share some good news with the community in the near term.
Thanks for your patience. We’ve got a lot going on and will let you know more just as soon as we know more.
