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!
Traditionally, dev kits are sold at roughly the cost to produce them, perhaps with a small markup. Arduino is a notable exception, charging at least 10x their production cost for a dev kit. The competition was inevitable.
In the case of the original Arduino, I have a Chinese clone purchased for $3 that has substantially better quality, and has many of the features you would want from a dev kit, like ESD protection on the I/O pins.
This may interest you; might not be what you were asking for. I haven't built one, but keep an eye on it and dream of free time to surface mount solder and poke around with it. The repo used to have a cost estimate and think it came out to around $100 but my memory may be fuzzy.
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
> Gertboard is packaged as a kit. It doesn’t come preassembled; you will have to solder it together yourself.
I hope it won't take to long until there will be pre-assembled ones, too. For an open source design, all you need is someone who invests some money to get the board assembled in China and then sells it in a web store.
Here is an example, to show how affordable assembling low quantities of boards in China has become. For one of our designs, buying all the parts online in the US or Switzerland, was about $150. If you buy about a dozen of them in China, they are about the same price point. But then, they are already assembled according to our design! Once you buy around one hundred, you save considerable money. In our case, the offer we got is about $100 per board (33% savings!).
The lower the transaction cost, the better. If you think soldering has minimal transaction cost, compare the price of a soldering station with a Raspberry Pi.
You're not paying for the raw components... given the incredibly niche audience for this product and the development effort involved it's really cheap (and it looks like they are even hand soldered).
I agree that it may in fact be reasonable to pay $150 ( perhaps even $200 ) for such a thing. The real cost is much higher due to a need to solder components. This is an especial blocker for people with no soldering experience.
Really, the whole thing would make sense if it had a full cost breakdown to make a single one of them, getting the parts mostly from one location, rather than a random mix, many requiring a minimum purchase of X of them, instead of one.
It's a really cool project, it is just unclear exactly how much effort and money it would cost to make one of these. ( and what tools would be needed )
I mean, it's not like it's expensive to manufacture! One person soldering and maybe a single board and usb plug, its probably easy to make money if you can sell them for $30 or so in the volumes of 100's.
Unfortunately I don't sell the ready-made units any more -- they're just not cost-effective to sell like that at a price the market will bear.
I want to do a redesign with more cost-effective components (an STM32 Nucleo and a shield or Morpho backpack is one idea I'm considering).
I do have some PCBs left over, a bill of materials and can give you some guidance with part substitutions if you want to DIY one. Feel free to drop me a note on Twitter (@philpem), Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@m0ofx) or email (via www.philpem.me.uk) if you're interested.
Almost everything is cheaper to buy than to DIY. This is a hacker forum and people like to DIY for other reasons than cost, including customization, the learning experience of building something yourself, being fully FOSS, not waiting for long lead times in some locations, and other reasons.
>It is definitely not cheap to make one of these. If we had to ballpark what one of these would sell for — assembled and working — it would certainly be larger than $1k and smaller than $5k.
I think this is out of range for many hobbyists and even schools and the like. Projects like the ErgoDox show that kits in the range of a few hundred bucks can sell well.
>While the circuit board itself is large and a little bit expensive, the cost is actually dominated by the component and assembly costs of an extremely large number of tiny components, each of which is individually quite inexpensive. Add to that the setup and test costs of building complex things like these in small batches, and you'll immediately see how it adds up.
So, the the only way to bring the price down below USD 1000 is, besides (possibly community driven) bulk buying, a kit version.
> Is there going to be a soldering kit version of this?
> No. (But on the other hand, "Anything is a soldering kit if you're brave enough!")
This brings me to my question: Is soldering this even realistic?
Did you solder the prototype yourself? How long did that take?
I soldered the SMD diodes of a few Ergodoxen (76 for a board) and it gets boring quickly.
Can't imagine doing 4304 parts.
I agree with you. I think kits are too expensive and going the homebrew route is generally more fun and educational. But to answer: ePaper is expensive, $15-20 for that module. The rest of the components are cheap. You're paying for some profit for the designer, amortised development time, assembly (by hand?) and the fact that it should work straight away (i.e. so you don't spend time). Tindie also take a cut, 10-15%? Shipping isn't free for the seller either.
At work I grit my teeth and suggest we buy the dev kits because it's worth paying $100 for an official board to check something works tomorrow, vs 3 weeks for a PCB and 2 days of tinkering. But at home, as a hobbyist, I mutter under my breath and fire up Eagle.
I disagree on both counts. It is affordable to hobbyists (although only those that really value time over money - it's a lot more expensive, more hassle and lower quality than OSHPark). And a lot of companies could use this for prototyping, i.e. something between a breadboard and final PCB.
Quite cheap but to compare, you also need to add the cost of the touchscreen and the board to drive all this, and your result would probably not pass EMC requirements (for a hobby project, you wouldn't care).
Still cheaper to source these parts yourself, you are right, but the official screen isn't meant to be the cheapest, it's meant to be cheap enough to be affordable, to workout-of-the-box, to be reliable, of good quality and have some guaranteed availability.
You can work with other screens and build and write your own interface if that's part of the pleasure you get from hacking on these devices, but for people who have other goals, being able to get an affordable screen that just works allows them to spend their time on other parts of their project.
Seems like a good enough prototyping kit for open source hardware.
I wonder why the 'no-price-scaling' per unit for bulk orders is considered a feature though.
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.
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