> 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 w

> 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.