5 ms·

Good points all. I think this highlights how important adoption curves, cost curves and volume are to the overall context. Going from $1000 to $100 can put so

Good points all. I think this highlights how important adoption curves, cost curves and volume are to the overall context. Going from $1000 to $100 can put something into the hands of experimental, hobby or light-commercial projects. It can enable new applications. These can be fundamental to setting an overall direction. Going from $10 to $1 is neither here nor there in those contexts. Cost, as you say, is virtually irrelevant unless/until volume is very substantial. Volume is not usually part of the early adopter game, and price, below a certain threshold is only relevant at high volume. Price (below some threshold) may never be a meaningful factor for a microcontroller built to control commercial lighting systems or whatnot. The old habit is that price really matters. As prices dropped, this opened up entirely new uses for microcontrollers. Applications that would have been unreasonable at $100 became possible @ $10. That's not the dynamic anymore.

londons_explore 6y ago
A lot of businesses need to demonstrate that a product is margin-positive... That means if you are making a new gadget to send out to users, and hoping to make money on data collection, a subscription service, ad revenue, etc., the unit cost of the hardware is critical to the business case, even if it isn't much money overall. Try telling investors "we made this weather station, and we will make money by selling data to NOAA". The very first question will be "how much does each station cost", and "how much will NOAA pay". Nobody asks how many engineering hours you spent writing the code to fit on the microcontroller, because the assumption is that in any successful business that becomes irrelevant. Perhaps investors should accept "Each weather station costs $1000, but we think we can get it down to $10". But most investors won't believe you if you say that...
- dalbasal 6y ago
  In some cases, I agree. But to be operative in this way, you must be talking about a very high volume. Millions of units, or close. My point was not that cost never matters, just that $1000->$100 is not the same as $10->$1. If your weather station startup is using $10 microcontrollers, getting that down to $1 is probably not important. If you are building 10 million weather stations, it is important, but this is a pretty specific scenario that doesn't apply often. We say something similar with PC pricing. The cost of a functional PC never stopped falling, but that stopped being as important once a certain threshold was reached. Projects like RasberryPi do take advantage of continued cost reductions, but Pi is marginal relative to earlier cost reductions cause an explosion of PC use cases.
rckoepke 6y ago
There are things I would build many of if they cost $2 instead of $20. Say a medium-resolution 3D volumetric mapping of temperature and humidity in my house becomes reasonable at $2/node, but not at $20/node. I think scale still applies at this level, but fewer hackers are thinking in terms of swarms. There are transformative applications at scale that could be interesting even to individual hackers, but scale is its own niche, just as IoT in general is a niche.
- mkl 6y ago
  Interesting idea. How would you power a swarm like that?
  - jwr 6y ago
    Great point :-) I don't know how to build an $2 device. Especially given that in any small device I've designed, power management always took 30-60% of board space and device cost. You reach the upper bounds if it uses a Li-Po battery. There is a big gap between powering a hobby device from a bench power supply and building an actual end-user solution. EDIT: I'm reading the answers here and it's clear I did not clearly communicate what I meant. Taping a board to a bunch of AA batteries is not an actual end-user solution. Neither is hanging a couple of boards off a bunch of wires. I was talking about products, something you might expect to pull out of a retail box and use. Those mentioning PoE clearly haven't designed a device that is powered with IEEE 802.3af-2003 :-) (I have, and I have the battle scars to prove it). PoE doesn't mean you can just connect the wires and call it a day.
    - kaetemi 6y ago
      I wonder if single twisted pair Ethernet that's being standardized with PoE might become popular for cheap sensor devices... Putting WiFi on a sensor makes no sense when you still have to run a power wire.
      - jon-wood 6y ago
        I don't know how it turned out, but a friend of mine was talking about running a DC power loop round his house alongside the AC one. The idea was that he could pull 5-12v lines off that for powering things like motion sensors, or even tablets being used as control panels, rather than having the house scattered with USB wall warts.
jwr 6y ago
> The old habit is that price really matters. This is a good point. I actually always sort by price when selecting components — not just to be cheap, but also because less expensive components are generally more popular and widely used, which means they are better support, better availability and better longevity. But — to all those who worry about price — I would suggest looking back and checking how many devices you actually built in the past? Was it singles, tens, perhaps hundreds? At these price points, how much would you save using a $1 uC instead of a $5 uC? Is it tens of dollars? Perhaps hundreds? Now compare that to the cost of your time spent developing and maintaining the software. At any reasonable hourly rate you pick for yourself, you're probably better off going with the uC that has good software out of the box. If you decide to build your devices in commercial quantities, that's when price optimization begins to matter, and somebody will care about fractions of a penny. But that somebody won't be you: going beyond single thousands involves a different set of skills.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Even in the 10s of thousands, these price differences should probably be a secondary issue for many commercial contexts... at least at the startup end of the game. If you are producing a $40 microwave, smart bulb or somesuch... shaving dollars off component costs is operative. I think this supports your original point rather than detracts from it. This is the mass production game, a mostly big company game. Microcontrollers have reached a cost point where the dynamic has inverted. The people who need to care about a new, cheaper-than-ever mc are large companies, not startups, hobbyists and niche product designers. There will be lots of exceptions, especially hobbyist use case... but generally. There is such a thing as cheap enough.

londons_explore 6y ago

A lot of businesses need to demonstrate that a product is margin-positive... That means if you are making a new gadget to send out to users, and hoping to make money on data collection, a subscription service, ad revenue, etc., the unit cost of the hardware is critical to the business case, even if it isn't much money overall. Try telling investors "we made this weather station, and we will make money by selling data to NOAA". The very first question will be "how much does each station cost", and "how much will NOAA pay". Nobody asks how many engineering hours you spent writing the code to fit on the microcontroller, because the assumption is that in any successful business that becomes irrelevant. Perhaps investors should accept "Each weather station costs $1000, but we think we can get it down to $10". But most investors won't believe you if you say that...

dalbasal 6y ago
In some cases, I agree. But to be operative in this way, you must be talking about a very high volume. Millions of units, or close. My point was not that cost never matters, just that $1000->$100 is not the same as $10->$1. If your weather station startup is using $10 microcontrollers, getting that down to $1 is probably not important. If you are building 10 million weather stations, it is important, but this is a pretty specific scenario that doesn't apply often. We say something similar with PC pricing. The cost of a functional PC never stopped falling, but that stopped being as important once a certain threshold was reached. Projects like RasberryPi do take advantage of continued cost reductions, but Pi is marginal relative to earlier cost reductions cause an explosion of PC use cases.

rckoepke 6y ago

There are things I would build many of if they cost $2 instead of $20. Say a medium-resolution 3D volumetric mapping of temperature and humidity in my house becomes reasonable at $2/node, but not at $20/node. I think scale still applies at this level, but fewer hackers are thinking in terms of swarms. There are transformative applications at scale that could be interesting even to individual hackers, but scale is its own niche, just as IoT in general is a niche.

mkl 6y ago
Interesting idea. How would you power a swarm like that?
- jwr 6y ago
  Great point :-) I don't know how to build an $2 device. Especially given that in any small device I've designed, power management always took 30-60% of board space and device cost. You reach the upper bounds if it uses a Li-Po battery. There is a big gap between powering a hobby device from a bench power supply and building an actual end-user solution. EDIT: I'm reading the answers here and it's clear I did not clearly communicate what I meant. Taping a board to a bunch of AA batteries is not an actual end-user solution. Neither is hanging a couple of boards off a bunch of wires. I was talking about products, something you might expect to pull out of a retail box and use. Those mentioning PoE clearly haven't designed a device that is powered with IEEE 802.3af-2003 :-) (I have, and I have the battle scars to prove it). PoE doesn't mean you can just connect the wires and call it a day.
  - kaetemi 6y ago
    I wonder if single twisted pair Ethernet that's being standardized with PoE might become popular for cheap sensor devices... Putting WiFi on a sensor makes no sense when you still have to run a power wire.
    - jon-wood 6y ago
      I don't know how it turned out, but a friend of mine was talking about running a DC power loop round his house alongside the AC one. The idea was that he could pull 5-12v lines off that for powering things like motion sensors, or even tablets being used as control panels, rather than having the house scattered with USB wall warts.

jwr 6y ago

> The old habit is that price really matters. This is a good point. I actually always sort by price when selecting components — not just to be cheap, but also because less expensive components are generally more popular and widely used, which means they are better support, better availability and better longevity. But — to all those who worry about price — I would suggest looking back and checking how many devices you actually built in the past? Was it singles, tens, perhaps hundreds? At these price points, how much would you save using a $1 uC instead of a $5 uC? Is it tens of dollars? Perhaps hundreds? Now compare that to the cost of your time spent developing and maintaining the software. At any reasonable hourly rate you pick for yourself, you're probably better off going with the uC that has good software out of the box. If you decide to build your devices in commercial quantities, that's when price optimization begins to matter, and somebody will care about fractions of a penny. But that somebody won't be you: going beyond single thousands involves a different set of skills.

dalbasal 6y ago
Even in the 10s of thousands, these price differences should probably be a secondary issue for many commercial contexts... at least at the startup end of the game. If you are producing a $40 microwave, smart bulb or somesuch... shaving dollars off component costs is operative. I think this supports your original point rather than detracts from it. This is the mass production game, a mostly big company game. Microcontrollers have reached a cost point where the dynamic has inverted. The people who need to care about a new, cheaper-than-ever mc are large companies, not startups, hobbyists and niche product designers. There will be lots of exceptions, especially hobbyist use case... but generally. There is such a thing as cheap enough.