Jan, We sort of started working through some ideas last week some time. It would be expensive, but I don't think it would be anywhere near the number Ron talked about. Also, we were not talking about doing anything particularly commercial. Much like Ardour, Rosegarden, etc., are great apps but not necessarily marketable to the mass market, this card was envisioned by a few of us as something that starts to break the idea that you had to buy cards where you knew nothing about what was inside. All that said, there is no way that this device would be as cost effective as a commercially available device. The difference is that this community would actually have control over what a device like this does. My idea for a while has been to do a 1394-based device that uses some sort of Xilinx FPGA to implement most of the hardware. Possibly it might have a hardware mixer, zero-latency monitoring, etc., of possibly not. Beyond that it's pretty much A/D & D/A, possibly some digital I/Os like spdif or ADAT. Anyway, it's just an idea. Being that I recently find myself unemployed it seems like a way to pass some time until next year when I start looking for work again. (Although Apple is hiring now...) Anyway, I'm a bit old and out of touch with good tools. For this to be really interesting I think all the tools need to be Linux tools. I'm not even sure what's available for doing board design. As for internal software, if it was 1394-based then at a minimum we need a microcontroller to handle config ROM and general packet transmission/reception issues. We could certainly use someone with some experience in embedded and/or realtime software design. But again, this is mostly talk right now. I'm drawing a couple of block diagrams to sort of scope out what the parts list might look like. cheers, Mark On Thu, 25 Nov 2004 10:12:42 -0600, Jan Depner <eviltwin69(a)cableone.net> wrote: