>if you ever want to convert your project to something commercial, I would still consider raspberry pi and beaglebone instead based on software maturity and community support and their ecosystem at large.
Seconding this for the Beaglebone Black (including the Industrial variant). FreeBSD support and onboard Ethernet set it apart from some alternatives.
Chiming in that this applies to controls engineering as well (think PLCs). Start from the IO, cross-reference that through the rest to get a feel of chains of causality and how it all works. Oftentimes it's critical to go from zero to applying changes as quickly as possible when unfamiliar (and poorly documented!) machinery is down.
It surely would still make a difference, even though China's reaction would partially negate it, right? When there's government stimulus money to be had, someone's going to jump on the opportunity to use it up, even if prices are lower from China.
Someone's pocket is going to get fat, but I highly doubt that any real competitiveness can come out of it.
As any government subsidy, it usually not only does not bring the desired result, but whatever it does bring costs much more than any free market participant would be willing to pay for it. Unless that is subsidised as well.
China very successfully was able to reduce whole industries to nothing by subsidising those industries in China and subsidising the price of their output. One example is Rare Earth, there used to be some production of those things outside of China, there are none today. Want a magnet for your motor? China!
Follow up idea, which I'm sure adds tons more complexity: have each face be a different material or finish. E.g. one face is stainless, another anodized aluminum, zinc plated for a third, brass on another. Each of the edge pieces would have to be a two-part assembly, and the corners composed of the three materials joined together (joinery, screws, brazing).
That surely would feel strange with the varying densities and thermal masses while solving, but would look very cool. To be fair, it appears from the pictures that each center piece's pattern is symmetric, which avoids the difficult part of aligning those when solving (center often doesn't line up when solving a cube with pictures on the faces in place of a solid color).
Probably far too niche for selling these to be profitable, but I'd love to have one.
I think that it would be difficult to keep everything clean enough to avoid galvanic corrosion at the metal interfaces once someone has touched it. I experienced surprisingly rapid corrosion when securing copper lugs using zinc-plated steel nuts and bolts until I started handling them exclusively with gloves.
The corner and edge pieces are guaranteed to have the right orientation, but the center pieces can be in any 90° orientation. Imagine an arrow printed on a center piece; a cube can be solved and still have that arrow pointing to any of the 4 neighboring sides.
Ah, interesting, thanks! So it's possible to reach a configuration where every side has the centre rotated but all the colours match up. I would not have believed that without seeing it.
Very frustrating dealing with these systems, as it's known ahead of time that the experience is going to be a fruitless slog. Perhaps this increased friction is by design, to reduce the incoming support call volume?
Fortunately, for some of these systems, ignoring the menu and stating "Operator" over and over does lead to a human, when there appears to be no path through the menus to otherwise reach one. I've heard that cursing at the automated system also leads to a redirect to a human, too.
The results of this are that delivery companies still occasionally "lose" my address and tell me it's invalid and cannot be reached, despite having previously done so numerous times! I have no way to get through to the proper resources to fix their system after over a year.
>For one thing, they often make it against the ToS to host 'a server' (generally).
Beyond this, it can also be impossible due to lack of a static IP or control over the router (5G internet service with CGNAT). A VPS with WireGuard and remote port forwarding allows access for things like SSH.
Many DNS providers allow you to curl a particular URL to set the IP address for your domain. Set your server to curl it periodically, and it solves the lack of a static IP.
Seconding this for the Beaglebone Black (including the Industrial variant). FreeBSD support and onboard Ethernet set it apart from some alternatives.