Long term availability of Teensy boards

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morganwalsh

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Hello,

We are looking to redesign a product that has been around for nearly 20 years based on a Rabbit microprocessor (which is still available, although getting pricey).

From what I see in the forums and Paul's obvious passion for the Teensy platform, the short term future of Teensy is assured.
However, what are the long production plans and technical roadmap for the product?

I appreciate that Arduino and Teensy boards tend to be used for prototyping and small runs - anything larger (say a few thousand) and I guess you would design your own PCB.
We're looking at a few hundred per year so can't really justify our own CPU board so looking for guidance as to the long term availability of this or compatible platforms.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this and indeed general use of these types of boards for long term projects.

Many thanks
Gary
 
Teensy is just an implementation of the Freescale MK2X chips. The schematics of Teensy are freely available, there are even reference designs floating around so you can keep building your own for as long as you want. You can write and flash code to the chip without using the Teensy bootloader if you want. So I would say the Teensy has identically the same longevity as the chip it is based on.
 
Well, we're still making & selling the older Teensy 2.0 & Teensy++ 2.0 boards, for one anecdote about Teensy product longevity. However, Teensy 3.0 & 3.1, and the ancient 1.0 boards are discontinued. Admittedly, very few 1.0 boards were ever made. We discontinued 3.0 and 3.1 because 3.2 functionally replaces them.

Any realistic long-term roadmap is going to depend heavily on what Qualcomm decides to do after they acquire NXP, who only just recently acquired Freescale. Obviously a tiny company like PJRC has no influence over these industry titans!

About a year ago one of NXP/Freescale's VPs made a series of press releases about a strategy to rapidly transition to all 28 nm silicon process for iMX and Cortex-M7. That's a future I'd very much like to see. But to be realistic, it's hard to tell how much of that is merely wishful thinking and marketing hype versus NXP/Freescale's actual strategy.

My personal wish list (or corporate strategy if anyone could go so far as to call it) revolves mostly around the software side, especially improving the Arduino environment and its libraries. I'm going to refrain from making any specific promises, other than the general idea that we don't have any plans to discontinue the 32 bit Teensy boards, as long as Qualcomm/NXP/Freescale keeps making the chip.
 
Sounds good Paul - many thanks. To be fair I think we got lucky with the Rabbit to get a 17 year production life out of it. The main thing I feel is that keeping the core application code as portable as possible from the board
Code: 
 being used will allow migration to the son of Teensy or whatever that might be.
 
Yeah, the more you can stay to the common Arduino functions like pinMode, digitalWrite, etc and the widely used libraries like Wire, SPI, the easier porting to other boards will be.
 
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