Hey, droithomme. I'm the creator of Programmable-Air. Happy to tell you that the crowdfunding is fulfilled and extra kits are available for purchase.
The price is high, I agree. But that's mainly because the BOM cost is about 60$, the kit is large and expensive to ship, and it was fully assembled in New York. I'm looking forward for someone to make a cheap knockoff as much as you are!
The DIY kit cost is sort of irrelevant if you're making a product. It's the large quantity cost that sits at the top of the BOM.
It's very common for these companies to sell dev kits at high cost because the volume is tiny and the overhead of filling the order for them is large. This is nothing new.
$340 is more than the cost of the rest of the BOM, and it feels kind of crazy that the plastic housing would cost more than the electronics.
I get that the parts are 3D printed, but are they being printed on-demand or something? I wonder if the 3D printing files have been open sourced - would be interesting to hear from a 3D printing enthusiast here about the costs (it's HN, there's bound to be many!).
As a fellow developer I feel the same but then when I realize that the cost of building something cool like this as a hobby is very high(for me at-least), I feel like we are lucky enough to have picked a field where the cost of experimenting is close to zero.
As a middle ground, I've settled on home automation & hobby electronic projects with some micro controllers like esp32, rpi pico etc. It's worth a try for anybody itching to build something tangible.
PS: the total BOM cost for this cube project was around 2500 Euros.
You can make it yourself - all the parts and boards are on GitHub (so also a group buy for assembled boards is an option). I couldn't find a BOM cost estimate though and I guess it'd be $1-200 from scratch, plus things like custom buttons.
Depends on how much effort you're willing to put in. Back in the mid-2010s, our team made a 1U with a BOM cost of ~$3k, but we manufactured everything except the bare PCBs in-house. I'm sure the kits are a lot more expensive.
> Niche hardware like this doesn't cost next to nothing when made in small quantities.
You could use some off the shelf components like an ESP8266 or ESP32 module to dramatically reduce your cost. A hand full a discrete components, an electret microphone, auto gain amplifier, and a voltage regulator aren't going to set you back more than $10. A custom PCB is going to be $5 per unit max. The BOM is easily under $20 for a limited run of 10 to 20 units.
The most expensive things are going to be the enclosure and assembly. If you find an off the self enclosure then your costs drop considerably.
You could have a working prototype cobbled together in a day.
It's a price premium, not a premium product. A premium product in this space would cost 10x as much and nobody would bat an eye.
It's a DIY-ish kit with a low-cost BOM, no doubt about it. The limited availability / exclusivity is why it costs more than the $20 hobby kits on Amazon.
Nope. BOM cost is well under $25. The price includes a healthy component margin, assembly cost (in the UK), assembly margin, test and OTP programming cost. We are professional electrical engineers; we know how to do this stuff (and in any case, it's not rocket science).
Volume assumption is 10K batches. Anyone think I can't sell 10K of these?
Maybe I'm just spoiled by the Raspberry Pi, but I'm having trouble swallowing a $60 machine (and that's without any of the other gizmos that attach to it) when there are examples of products in the same niche that come out to a bit more than half that. Does the fancy low-power radio really cost that much?
On the other hand, I don't think the Arduino or the various other prototyping/microcontroller boards like this are any less-ridiculously priced, so maybe this is actually competitive and sane relatively-speaking. It still seems strange, however.
On the third hand, I suppose I could just download the schematics, source everything out, and figure out how to build it by hand. I have a feeling it would end up cheaper, even without being able to take advantage of bulk rates on the components.
This seems as if it could be cool, but the board is $350 with a BoM of about 50 bucks. Considering the current nascent state of things, this doesn't really feel like a project on a successful path.
I don't know why this is being downvoted. The EFM32 is about $1.20@1ku, the rest of the BOM adds up to a few cents, so a no-name Chinese manufacturer could sell these for less than $3 shipped and make a reasonable profit.
I understand that they have development costs to recoup, but their offer is anything but "super cheap". Even without quantity price breaks, I could build ten for $30.
You’d be surprised at how expensive it can be to manufacture, program, test, package, warehouse, sell, ship, and support small hardware projects like this.
It may seem overpriced when compared to collecting all of the pieces and putting them together for yourself, but the person trying to do this as a business has to make a big investment in up front purchasing as well as labor to get them all together and shipped out. It quickly reaches a point where doing it for an “undercutting” level price doesn’t justify the risk and effort.
I think you are conflating cost with value. Clearly there are folks out there who value the packaging, the work that has gone into programming libraries, etc. They value it enough to put up $40 for one. That has nothing at all to do with the cost, which as you point out in volume is probably less than $6 each although ATMega don't really get cheap until you hit 10K units.
If it isn't "worth" $40 then Sparkfun won't sell any more after they fulfill all their kickstarter rewards, or maybe they will drop the price or something.
I can actually understand why the costs might be so high if they're doing custom parts. The per-unit cost might be low but setting up molds etc. could be quite expensive. (Though that doesn't quite square with the claim of needing more money to complete an additional lot.)
In general, this seems like the sort of thing which really doesn't make a lot of sense in a Kickstarter context. I get the fact that it's cute in a certain gimicky sort of way but if I actually wanted something like this personally, I'd buy whatever size cooler at whatever price point made sense to me and put together a nice kit with whatever other accessories I wanted.
My thoughts exactly.... $100 for only 10 modules? i believe i can get a LOT more for 1/10 of the price... But i may be wrong. They did mention it is open source. So will look into exactly what those modules are and how expensive they are to build. Might build em myself as a gift for my kid sister
Have you considered they might be trading off on aspects that you don't care or don't know about?
As a sibling comment noted, a BOM might be $X compared to buying premade packages from Adafruit/Sparkfun at $X0. But paying $X0 means skipping over $X00 worth (or even $X,000) of schematic capture, board layout, design review, PCB fab, assembly, bringup, and fixing bugs.
The price is high, I agree. But that's mainly because the BOM cost is about 60$, the kit is large and expensive to ship, and it was fully assembled in New York. I'm looking forward for someone to make a cheap knockoff as much as you are!
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