4 ms·
It really depends on what you want to do with this product. What you're getting for $49 is hopefully a stable, tested, and well-supported platform which can re
by nsb1 9y ago
It really depends on what you want to do with this product. What you're getting for $49 is hopefully a stable, tested, and well-supported platform which can really help when all you want to do (or can afford to do) is concentrate on the other aspects of your product. Built-in OTA upgrades and pre-built manufacturing tools are very helpful as well. The $49 price point however, assuming a retail product, probably puts your final retail price north of $100 by the time you add in all the other components you're going to need to make this work plus profit. If your product fits into that space then you could save a lot of time going with a solution like this (but I do see a cost-reduction round in your near future).
If you're trying to stay below the magic $99 retail price point though, you may be in for a challenge. Do you need a battery? Is that chip antenna good enough or do you need to have a better one made? Plastics? Power supply? Those DF40-80 connectors alone are going to account for north of $1 in manufacturing quantities. And after all that, you still have to pay for whatever it is your product actually does.
When I'm designing products, I sweat over every dollar, and big ticket items like this really need to be justified. If I don't need 8GB of flash, I don't buy it. Likewise quad core - how big a battery am I going to need to drive that thing for whatever my requierment is? Could I save $5 on the battery by dropping to single core (and save another $1 there too)?
As with anything, I think the use case for this amounts to "It Depends". I think the price point for this puts it out of range of the IOT space, and it is over-spec'd for a basic RF bridge type application (plus all the issues that go with trying to control noise when you don't own the chip layout). Maybe as the driver for a custom touchpad or something like that. Suffice it to say that I think it has a market, but that's probably not competing in the IOT space, and likely not the prototype space either.
$.02
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago> When I'm designing products, I sweat over every dollar, and big ticket items like this really need to be justified. If you can spend (just) a month or two designing, debugging, and procuring a cost-optimized variant of this that costs $25 instead, your time spent on that is equivalent to just buying a thousand of these. One of the big things in the "it depends" question is how many of these things you plan to sell. If it's less than thousands, buy modules.
- opencl 9y agoThe problem is that there are a dozen Chinese companies that have already designed, debugged, and produced a cost-optimized variant of this for less than half the price. The Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 for example has the exact same SoC, same 8GB MMC, Wifi/BT, and is $20. Not saying that this board necessarily isn't worth it but clearly there is stiff competition in the SBC space and a lot of the boards are extremely cheap. The size is an advantage. It has mezzanine connectors instead of rows of headers. They claim they'll actually keep the kernel up to date which is a major problem with many of these SBCs, though I am rather skeptical given that they're using Allwinner chips. They cannot magically produce a new kernel without sources from Allwinner.
- nsb1 9y agoIt's a fair point. I deal in consumer electronics, and my company needs to make money, so I tend to think in terms of hundreds of thousands of units. I'm not sure how a company can even be profitable selling thousands of units unless they each cost thousands of dollars. When you get up into those prices, though, it feels (at least to me) like you're beyond embedded-class SOM devices like this. I guess if I could make a $100 device and sell it for $1000, I would. Maybe Apple would hire me... [ Disclaimer: I own an iPhone ]
- garmaine 9y ago> If you're trying to stay below the magic $99 retail price point though What are you imagining using this for? That seems like a really low price.