On 5/28/2015 5:17 PM, Gerald Coley wrote: > The race to the bottom could be the end of real OSHW. Real meaning HW that > really has an impact on the world, not just something cheap that does what > a thousand boards already do, like blink LEDS, but is really cheap. There > were a lot of MSP430 boards sold for $4.30. I suspect that most of them are > now in a desk or some other place. Impact was not lasting.
Well, my $4.30 board (and trip to the initial 4/30 day) turned into a few 10's of thousand parts shipped for my day job. We migrated from Atmel AVR parts to the MSP430 when the AVRs became "unobtanium" due to a mismanaged fab migration on Atmel's part (pro tip: don't shut down one fab before the other one is _really_ online!). I'm just glad I was aware of the MSP430 family, so I didn't have to seriously consider porting to a PIC or (god forbid) an 8051! ;-) > There is a number out there that says the price should be 2.6x the cost of > the BOM. I will say that the X-15 will be less than 2.6x the BOM, but it is > not in the pitiful range of the BBB margins. There is some margin there to > allow people to support it and invest in it, making it better. And > hopefully use it for something more than a fast Linux build machine or an > LED flasher. I'd personally prefer to see a viable product that has enough margin to support continued development than rock-bottom prices. I like the Arduino model, where official quality boards are affordable but still have a good profit margin. There's room at the bottom for Chinese clones if you only care about price, but I am willing to pay more for boards I know are built well, quality tested, and which give back to the community by funding further development. Keep up the great design work, Gerald! -- Charles Steinkuehler [email protected] -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
