Projected supply of the Omega2
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Anyone know the projected supply numbers? Will the Omega2 be available for wholesale?
I'm considering adding the Omega2 to a product but am wondering about projected supply. As we've seen, the Raspberry Pi foundation has struggled to meet demand of it's Zero board. (It's probably intended to be a loss-leader and never meant for major production. Edit: In fact I just got an email from them saying that the Zero will not be available for wholesale in the near future.) So there's no sense trying to add the Zero to a product if supply cannot meet demand.
But what about the Omega2? Anyone know the projected supply numbers? I'm looking to go live within a year, hopefully six months.
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Unfortunately, it would be safer for you to assume that the Omegas are only produced in limited quantity. GET IT WHILE IT'S HOT!!! It was the case for the Omega1, and it seems to be the case for the Omega2 (a 500K units production is huge, but still a limited quantity). There are lots of competitions out there, and the market is more geared to the hobbyist, IMO. Once people have a working unit, they do not necessarily need another unit. That makes the market very tough for manufacturers like Onion.
My recommendation would be to talk with Onion (once the Omega2 are all shipped) about the possibility of small batch orders in the future and see what they say about that.
A safer route for your business sustainability would be to have a Plan B. Consider having your product designed from the ground up, produced in small quantity as your clients demand grows. The processors used by the Omegas are very popular, so the chances that they will still be available on the short and medium term is very high. And on the long term, expect some adjustment to your design to support newer versions of the processor that you would have selected. In the alternative that we assume that the Omega2 will be backorder in a few years (heaven forbids), the Omega2 is still an awesome device to develop your product prototype, and act as a firmware development and test platform for your product.
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Curious if the situation is still the same for this?
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There are two nested questions here - availability of the Omega2 module specifically, and availability of the MT7688 SoC around which it is built.
In terms of the module, the Omega2 is just the most well known of several MT7688 solutions from several different vendors; in doing a product it makes sense to consider all of them and what the migration path from one to another would be.
Predicting the availability of the MT7688 itself is a bit more complicated, but then it is basically just an SoC intended to run Linux in a cheap wifi router, which has been marketed for additional IoT purposes, so doing a design in such a way that porting to a successor or competing SoC would not be too painful, is a means of future proofing. Software wise this is fairly simple as long as you are building your key dependencies from source; hardware wise, the more distinct interfaces you use the more complex it becomes.
