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On the other hand, they also open themselves to people just making their own versions of the product for much less. If you choose them for their hackability, y
by leggomylibro 9y ago
On the other hand, they also open themselves to people just making their own versions of the product for much less.
If you choose them for their hackability, your core processors will probably have minimal development boards available for less than $2.50 each if you're using anything less powerful than a Cortex-M4 ARM core.
And now you have a huge part of your value proposition - the easy-to-use and user-configurable software - available for free. It will be cheaper for users to create their own version of your product unless you have some very complex or precise supporting hardware. End users will get a fun learning experience and customized product if they don't buy from you, and 3rd-party wholesalers will undercut you quickly and viciously.
So, hopefully your marketing department can pull at peoples' heart strings enough to make up for the order of magnitude difference in price. It works for companies like Adafruit and Sparkfun because they give back and people appreciate that, but how much room is there for companies that rely on goodwill to keep running?
- photojosh 9y ago> On the other hand, they also open themselves to people just making their own versions of the product for much less. There is a large exception for anything with a camera. Everything to do with the chipsets or sensors is under NDA and inaccessible unless you want to produce thousands of devices. I would love to be able to play with (say) a half-decent 2 year old camera chipset+sensor, which would apparently cost just a few $, but it's a no go. For instance, the Raspberry Pi camera is entirely handled by closed-source blobs on the CPU and GPU. The best you can do is get cheap USB webcams from China for $20-30, but they're power hungry and you can't run them from a microcontroller.