This is a one man show. How he handled the power/voltage issue was really great service
I had a local friend fix mine, thankfully, right before lock down last year (1 year ago! I miss hanging out...). I believe you know Christian from A1K.
He keeps managing making more batches. It’s not like spinnaker big money on this.
What do you expect?
This one is hard for me to answer as I love Lukas H, his work, and respect him very highly. Please don't take offense to this.
If I go back in my mind to when I bought it, I think I expected USB/Ethernet to be "partially baked" but wasn't sure how long the development to finish them would take. I assumed, "eventually" but not open-ended. That was well over a year ago. And as a customer, one must be very pro-active to get a handle on software updates, I've learned.
My main reasons for buying it were for the RTG graphics card output, and for the hope of it being a capture card. My understanding today is that the capture card aspect of the card is not 100% awesome yet. I could be wrong but that's what I was told by a Twitch streamer.
When I bought the card I guess I kind of thought it would have been supported a bit more than by a small handful of other customers, but that was probably naive on my part. It's not like the market for this card is massive. And out of that entire market only a tiny percentage would have the talent and skills to actually write code to improve the firmware and drivers.
I wasn't entirely focused on the USB / Ethernet then. They were bonuses and not the main selling points for me. But I know I helped justify buying the card by telling myself they would be there some day. After a close friend of mine who also got the card was honest with me in his own experiences, I came to realize those features
might get full support some day, but if they do it'll simply be a pleasant surprise.
In other words: get the ZZ as a graphics card first and foremost unless you happen to be a hardware programmer and like to tinker, or are
very patient for the rest of the hardware to get full support. I count myself in that 2nd bucket. And keep using your Rapid Road/X-surf setups if you really depend on those features today. That's what my friend ultimately did; he backtracked and used all of it together as the ZZ's "extras" simply aren't where they need to be yet.
The graphics card is really what it is all about and it delivers big time.
And let's be honest. It's a
new card AND
1/3 the cost of what 20 year old RTG cards fetch on Ebay. So if you really want to have a modern display with HDMI on your old hardware, in my view this is really the only way to go. Well... the new
much cheaper rPi solution might gain some traction for those just wanting crisp output without higher resolutions... I've put my name on that list, for what it's worth. (And the board developer lives 30 minutes away from me, I recently learned!)
I don't think we should feel upset, or defensive, about the USB/ethernet options on the ZZ. But let's be honest about them, too. They aren't the top-shelf product that the ZZ card itself is for video.
That's all I'm saying.