I’ve attempted several times to get a copy of the FU740 manual but I haven’t even gotten a reply, let alone a manual. Can I get a copy of that or should I just cancel my preorder?
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FU740 manual has been available for some time now on the website:
Check “Freedom U740-C000 Manual”
“HiFive Unmatched Getting Started Guide” is also available, and I believe both showed up on the website at the same time.
If it’s available, could you download and share it? Because I can’t find a download link.
When I tried clicking on it from the page, it was just giving me a form to fill out to request the manual, which it’s still doing now. Anyway, thank you for the link, however you found it!
Only once you fill the form you can download the manual (there is no registration needed).
The form is not to request the manual – you get the manual as soon as you hit “submit” I guess they’re just gathering some data, but there’s nothing to prevent you putting false information in the form.
Strange, I hit submit but never got the manual, so I thought it was a “we’ll email it to you” thing.
Just tried with my adblocker disabled and it still didn’t work, so not sure what is going on; clicking “Submit” just causes the form to disappear.
You’ve checked your downloads folder?
I don’t use it. PDFs should either open automatically in pdf.js or ask where to be saved like any other file.
Strange; I opened up the Web Console to see if I could find any clues, and when I click the submit button, I get an HTTP/2 400 Bad Request response. Not sure why.
It’s so sad to see this attitude towards sharing the reference manual, when a company removes messages on the forums which can be useful for the community. I really like the hardware SiFive makes, but with this “level” of support, I think I will abandon the idea of ordering HiFive Unmatched as well as supporting HiFive devices in the Embedded Rust ecosystem.
I’m shocked.
How is someone supposed to get documentation for their SiFive product is the company goes out of business and the official web site disappears? Perhaps a product they have obtained used, so they don’t have the opportunity to download “their copy” of the documentation now.
I know you don’t think it’s going to happen with your company. No one does. But it happens all the time.
.
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Oh… yeah, that’s really bad… can we get an official response on this? I just had a PM where I said I was looking forward to building this system but now I’m seriously considering cancelling my preorder as well; not allowing the sharing and archival of datasheets is a cardinal engineering sin in my book…
ADDENDUM: Bonus, I just noticed they deleted a reply with the link to the datasheet hosted on their own CDN (the link you’re sent to after filling out the form), likely to force people to fill out the form just to get it.
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Thanks for the feedback on our documentation. Today, we removed the registration requirement for documentation relating to SiFive chips and HiFive boards found at sifive.com/documentation (and elsewhere on our website). We hope that this will make it easier to get the latest, up-to-date documentation.
In addition, to address the issues raised by the community, we’re investigating how to enable long-term access to documentation ASAP.
@NekoMay, @bruce, @whitequark - thanks to each of you for your personal investment in SiFive and RISC-V.
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Thanks Phil! Acknowledging and addressing mistakes is hard but it is also what separates healthy organizations from the rest. I look forward to working with SiFive devices in the future.
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Thanks Phil
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Excellent, this is great to hear. I’ll definitely be keeping my preorder and eagerly looking forward to receiving and working with not only my Unmatched but with the people here on this board.
Thanks very much!
Thank you @phil.dworsky. Some of the value of a product is in its resale value. Fortunately I was able to both register and download the documents. But, I can see others having trouble, (as I have had at other sites doing something similar).
Making your product’s documentation available for long term is one more step to creating value in the product itself.
It’s perfectly reasonable to list somewhere on the first pages a place to get the most current version of the documentation. But, if that site is not available anymore, what a person has, is all they have.
Ideally, you would put the documents on a public revision control system, like GitHub. If it were me, I would then restrict the public to issues and pull requests, reserving the commits to company internal staff. That way people could make easily track-able suggestions as issues and actual updates that should be done, (typos, in-correct information), as pull requests. Plus, internal updates can have reasons attached to why that update was performed, which the general public can then view as part of a products’ development transparency.
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Why isn’t the documentation under an open source license too?
The documentation page doesn’t have the Unmatched manual on there, btw.
You’re right, the board isn’t listed on the documentation page yet. Probably an oversight, as the SoC manual is there.
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