Wow, what a journey; to start with the Beaglebone finding big-endian worked fairly well to find out its completely broken on Buffee and that big endian is completely unsupported on the AM3358, something the people at TI will repeat in their support forums again, and again, and again. But it's all a lie and big endian does work … perfectly. So what's up?

As a follow-up to my original thoughts on open sourcing, I am pleased to announce that we've reopened the source code for PJIT as well as merged and closed the private repository. The one and only repository for PJIT can be found here.. PJIT will remain open-source forever but also only non-commercial use.

With Buffee sort of languishing in the wind, I took a few hours to slap together another board to ensure my PCB routing skills don't get rusty. Instead of a CPU accelerator or anything like that, this is going back to our original Amiga Replacement Project and prodiving DIP and PLCC sides replacements for all the custom and insanely difficult to get custom chips. First up is Gary, or as we call him, Gary Zander.

The idea of open source is a nobel one and as long as everyone "plays fair," it works. It was our genuine hope that people could learn from our design – we thought PJIT has some rather novel ideas in it that could be a benefit to everyone. How was this made? How does it work? We thought people could maybe try and make their own boards, but this is a slippery slope – what if someone wants to make 20 for their friends out of their own funds? What if someone has no regard for our license and simply uses our work to make their own Buffee?

I have many words for the last year, none of which I can really express here. Suffice to say that this "chip shortage" has pushed back retail production run into January – at least at this point – I believe nothing anyone's saying until I have boards physically in hand. Despite the delays, our beta testing is going along well, but very, very slowly. We're still waiting for the last of the beta boards to come in before we begin shipping, and I absolutely appreciate everyone's patience with this. Software is coming along nicely and we have good timing on the bus and can read and write, so that's progress!

I'm not one to brag, but when I mess up, I mess up like no one else. But before I start committing seppuku, let me tell you the good news: we got the beta's in and managed to power them up. And wow, do they look gorgeous!