I am overjoyed that Orthrus has been chosen as one of 20 semi-finalists for the Hackaday Prize best product round. I totally did not see this coming (to be truthful, I expected my other entry to move on). I've not been doing a lot with Orthrus of late mostly because the current design as it exists on Tindie hasn't sold even one and I had other more interesting irons in the fire.

But all of that changed today!

The basic functionality of Orthrus as it is today is there, but Orthrus is just too slow to be taken seriously. If this is going to be worthy of the label Best Product, then it needs to be at least within an order of magnitude or so of customary USB/SD mass storage device speeds - something north of 1 MB/sec (instead of the current 150 kB/sec), while retaining the current basic feature set and operational characteristics.

The last long entry held out hope for the ATSAM4E16E, but it only supports full-speed USB. Given our new expectations, we need to find an interface capable of high speed USB (480 mb/sec, not 12). That, of course, will bring with it a whole new set of challenges - primarily getting the interface wiring just right. At first glance, the AT32UC3A4128S looks like it might be a contender. They're $6.10 @ Q:1 from DigiKey and in stock. But in addition to the aforementioned high speed USB challenges, this chip also brings with it the challenge of programming over JTAG (which I've never done before) and BGA reflow (which I've also never done before). And since it's BGA, that means moving to a RoHS reflow process, which - again - is something I've never done. I'm also going to have to figure out how to use the hardware SD interface on this chip as well as adapting the existing firmware to the UC3 architecture generally (the good news is that LUFA does support it).

It's always really nerve-wracking to have so many "firsts" all at one time... the really hard part is if it doesn't work, it's not always easy to tell which of the firsts is the one you've gotten wrong. Fingers crossed.

EDIT:

After a nice twitter conversation with MarkAtMicrochip, another contender is the ATSAMS70N19. There's a nice eval board for the E70, which Mark explained is a superset, so I've ordered one to start getting familiar with the toolchain and architecture and whatnot. One of the remaining questions will be how to multiplex two SD card sockets across a single HSMCI interface, but I can't imagine there isn't some easy way to do that with just a GPIO pin as a "slot select" and some external buffers.