5 ms·

Is it just me, or is $269 monstrously expensive for some injection moulded plastic, plastic geared servo motors, an arduino compatible board, a battery and some

Is it just me, or is $269 monstrously expensive for some injection moulded plastic, plastic geared servo motors, an arduino compatible board, a battery and some connectivity modules?

lambdaone 2y ago
I presume the value is in the associated open source software. You could obviously build your own for less in hardware costs, but once you've put in the effort of doing so, you will have spent far more of your time on the project than the cost of the ready-made product. You're paying for the bundling and the convenience.
beambot 2y ago
The Sony Aibo harkens back to the late 1990s. It was (roughly) the same, but cost >$2000 in 1990s dollars. TLDR: It's not expensive.
- JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
  A luxury product for early adopters that looks great and works out of the box does not seem roughly the same to me than a device you still ultimately have to calibrate, expand (the default model of this doesn't even have a camera iirc) and program loads to do anything.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
ginko 2y ago
There's also PuppyPi which looks quite a bit more solid (but is also more expensive) https://www.hiwonder.com/products/puppypi?variant=39776033144919 https://www.hiwonder.com/products/puppypi?variant=3977603314...
- beambot 2y ago
  Unitree Go2 for $1600 is wildly capable. https://www.unitree.com/go2 https://www.unitree.com/go2
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Have you used it? What was the experience getting it into the US?
M4v3R 2y ago
The bill of materials might not come close to that number, but materials are not the only cost when creating a hardware product. In your end price you need to factor in stuff like time spent on research, designing, testing, prototyping, writing & debugging software. Then there's manufacturing, packaging, storage, marketing and probably others. When you take all these into account plus the fact that this will not sell in millions of units, the price suddenly doesn't seem that high. And from a consumer point of view - a very technical person could probably pull off something similar to this, but the amount of hours a project like this would take a single person is probably in the hundreds and you would not approach the quality of this unless you invested a lot of money into equipment (assuming you don't own high quality 3d printers and other things required to build this).
- petoi 2y ago
  Our first robot Nybble cat was born as a maker project https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nybble-world-s-cutest-open-source-robotic-cat#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nybble-world-s-cutest-ope... with crowdfunding in 2018. Bittle was also born from our crowdfunding project on Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petoi/bittle https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petoi/bittle in 2020. You can read about our history there. In addition to the points you raised, one of the big challenges is to manage the supply chain and the bill of materials. For example, during covid, we faced the challenges of chip shortage. For any hobbyist project, people don't really need to worry about things at scale.
lemper 2y ago
bro how much did you pay for your car that is presumably around 1000kg?
- bArray 2y ago
  I'm not sure that is a good comparison. My old car cost ~$500 and weighed about 1000kg. If anything that is a comment on consumerism and not the value of things. The value of this platform comes from the R&D, scale, support, packaged software, etc, etc. Assuming they sell 10000 units at an average ~$300. At that scale likely a $100 of each unit is in parts/tooling, then assembly/flashing/testing. That's approximately $20mn to be split by: 1. Likely minimum team of 10 people on development for 4 years, at ~$100k per year (with overheads), for $4mn. Kickstarter in 2020: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petoi/bittle https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petoi/bittle 2. Investors probably threw in $4mn along the way and look to claw that back (couldn't find investment info on a quick search). 3. Tax appears to be ~20% in most places, so 20% of $30mn is $6mn. Leaving approximately $6mn, everybody gets a bump and they are left with enough to expand and run the company for ~2-4 years without needing to raise additional investment. That's a lot of pressure to get a new product out there.
dvh 2y ago
If you sell hw products and you're not charging at least 4x parts costs you will go bankrupt.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Your parent should really check out the BOM on his iPhone or MacBook before complaining about $270 being "monstrously expensive" hardware. And all those gadgets benefit from high volume discounts on parts, decades of sunk R&D costs and the volume economies of scale, assembled by sweatshop workers, not niche low volume production runs for enthusiasts like this one. The price of Pizza at your local non-fast-food restaurant is also significantly higher than that of the bulk raw ingredients it's made of. Now also try adding the R&D costs of inventing the Pizza to that see where that gets you.
  - voidUpdate 2y ago
    she doesn't have an iPhone or a MacBook because I do think they're expensive. I buy my phones used on eBay and cringe if they cost more than £50
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      How you feel about your SO's phone pricing is besides the point. The point was that you don't understand the distinction between the retail price of a product and raw BOM costs. Please read the comments here trying to educate you.
      - voidUpdate 2y ago
        what do you mean about my SO? I was referring to myself
        Rinzler89 2y ago
        Sorry but you did refer to yourself at the third person as "she", so how was anyone supposed to know?
blowski 2y ago
Similar to how software engineers get paid $1000s just to keep hitting the keyboard.
- scotty79 2y ago
  Hey! Those keys are small! And there are so many!
tomcam 2y ago
Excellent business opportunity for someone with your knowledge
imtringued 2y ago
I wouldn't say it is monstrously expensive, but it is kind of underwhelming at that price point. It doesn't even have three degrees of freedom on its legs, which is what I would expect on a basic quadruped.
- petoi 2y ago
  Bittle has a tiny body, but it has strong and fast servos for running and even backflipping(check this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRE-sp05ia8&list=TLGG0bKEfuYvDmsyNDA0MjAyNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRE-sp05ia8&list=TLGG0bKEfuY...). We custom-designed our own high-quality servos which are half of the prices of any comparable servos. We already had a prototype with 3 degrees of freedom on the legs. But the structural complexity and price would have increased substantially. We are not releasing it at this moment. You can check Petoi robot joint index documentation at https://docs.petoi.com/petoi-robot-joint-index https://docs.petoi.com/petoi-robot-joint-index
- regularfry 2y ago
  It's a tradeoff with size. It's very hard to squeeze shoulder servos in and keep it that small.
numpad0 2y ago
Kind of, compared to high-volume products most consumers are used to see. R&D gets expensive fast. Just try designing these up to first partial prototype and try calculating cumulative man-hour spent x local minimum wages x highly optimistic sales^-1 = pure R&D cost per unit before any manufacturing or even design reviews. It's not going to make a lot of commercial sense. 3D printing people sometimes says dollar stores makes them feel defeated. I'm not yet at that level but it's true, a 10-pack ball point pens at $1 makes very little sense if you knew.

Is it just me, or is $269 monstrously expensive for some injection moulded plastic, plastic geared servo motors, an arduino compatible board, a battery and some connectivity modules?

lambdaone 2y ago

I presume the value is in the associated open source software. You could obviously build your own for less in hardware costs, but once you've put in the effort of doing so, you will have spent far more of your time on the project than the cost of the ready-made product. You're paying for the bundling and the convenience.

beambot 2y ago

The Sony Aibo harkens back to the late 1990s. It was (roughly) the same, but cost >$2000 in 1990s dollars. TLDR: It's not expensive.

JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
A luxury product for early adopters that looks great and works out of the box does not seem roughly the same to me than a device you still ultimately have to calibrate, expand (the default model of this doesn't even have a camera iirc) and program loads to do anything.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

ginko 2y ago

There's also PuppyPi which looks quite a bit more solid (but is also more expensive) https://www.hiwonder.com/products/puppypi?variant=39776033144919 https://www.hiwonder.com/products/puppypi?variant=3977603314...

beambot 2y ago
Unitree Go2 for $1600 is wildly capable. https://www.unitree.com/go2 https://www.unitree.com/go2
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Have you used it? What was the experience getting it into the US?

M4v3R 2y ago

The bill of materials might not come close to that number, but materials are not the only cost when creating a hardware product. In your end price you need to factor in stuff like time spent on research, designing, testing, prototyping, writing & debugging software. Then there's manufacturing, packaging, storage, marketing and probably others. When you take all these into account plus the fact that this will not sell in millions of units, the price suddenly doesn't seem that high. And from a consumer point of view - a very technical person could probably pull off something similar to this, but the amount of hours a project like this would take a single person is probably in the hundreds and you would not approach the quality of this unless you invested a lot of money into equipment (assuming you don't own high quality 3d printers and other things required to build this).

petoi 2y ago
Our first robot Nybble cat was born as a maker project https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nybble-world-s-cutest-open-source-robotic-cat#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nybble-world-s-cutest-ope... with crowdfunding in 2018. Bittle was also born from our crowdfunding project on Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petoi/bittle https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petoi/bittle in 2020. You can read about our history there. In addition to the points you raised, one of the big challenges is to manage the supply chain and the bill of materials. For example, during covid, we faced the challenges of chip shortage. For any hobbyist project, people don't really need to worry about things at scale.

lemper 2y ago

bro how much did you pay for your car that is presumably around 1000kg?

bArray 2y ago
I'm not sure that is a good comparison. My old car cost ~$500 and weighed about 1000kg. If anything that is a comment on consumerism and not the value of things. The value of this platform comes from the R&D, scale, support, packaged software, etc, etc. Assuming they sell 10000 units at an average ~$300. At that scale likely a $100 of each unit is in parts/tooling, then assembly/flashing/testing. That's approximately $20mn to be split by: 1. Likely minimum team of 10 people on development for 4 years, at ~$100k per year (with overheads), for $4mn. Kickstarter in 2020: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petoi/bittle https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petoi/bittle 2. Investors probably threw in $4mn along the way and look to claw that back (couldn't find investment info on a quick search). 3. Tax appears to be ~20% in most places, so 20% of $30mn is $6mn. Leaving approximately $6mn, everybody gets a bump and they are left with enough to expand and run the company for ~2-4 years without needing to raise additional investment. That's a lot of pressure to get a new product out there.

dvh 2y ago

If you sell hw products and you're not charging at least 4x parts costs you will go bankrupt.

Rinzler89 2y ago
Your parent should really check out the BOM on his iPhone or MacBook before complaining about $270 being "monstrously expensive" hardware. And all those gadgets benefit from high volume discounts on parts, decades of sunk R&D costs and the volume economies of scale, assembled by sweatshop workers, not niche low volume production runs for enthusiasts like this one. The price of Pizza at your local non-fast-food restaurant is also significantly higher than that of the bulk raw ingredients it's made of. Now also try adding the R&D costs of inventing the Pizza to that see where that gets you.
- voidUpdate 2y ago
  she doesn't have an iPhone or a MacBook because I do think they're expensive. I buy my phones used on eBay and cringe if they cost more than £50
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    How you feel about your SO's phone pricing is besides the point. The point was that you don't understand the distinction between the retail price of a product and raw BOM costs. Please read the comments here trying to educate you.
    - voidUpdate 2y ago
      what do you mean about my SO? I was referring to myself
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        Sorry but you did refer to yourself at the third person as "she", so how was anyone supposed to know?

blowski 2y ago

Similar to how software engineers get paid $1000s just to keep hitting the keyboard.

scotty79 2y ago
Hey! Those keys are small! And there are so many!

tomcam 2y ago

Excellent business opportunity for someone with your knowledge

imtringued 2y ago

I wouldn't say it is monstrously expensive, but it is kind of underwhelming at that price point. It doesn't even have three degrees of freedom on its legs, which is what I would expect on a basic quadruped.

petoi 2y ago
Bittle has a tiny body, but it has strong and fast servos for running and even backflipping(check this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRE-sp05ia8&list=TLGG0bKEfuYvDmsyNDA0MjAyNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRE-sp05ia8&list=TLGG0bKEfuY...). We custom-designed our own high-quality servos which are half of the prices of any comparable servos. We already had a prototype with 3 degrees of freedom on the legs. But the structural complexity and price would have increased substantially. We are not releasing it at this moment. You can check Petoi robot joint index documentation at https://docs.petoi.com/petoi-robot-joint-index https://docs.petoi.com/petoi-robot-joint-index
regularfry 2y ago
It's a tradeoff with size. It's very hard to squeeze shoulder servos in and keep it that small.

numpad0 2y ago

Kind of, compared to high-volume products most consumers are used to see. R&D gets expensive fast. Just try designing these up to first partial prototype and try calculating cumulative man-hour spent x local minimum wages x highly optimistic sales^-1 = pure R&D cost per unit before any manufacturing or even design reviews. It's not going to make a lot of commercial sense. 3D printing people sometimes says dollar stores makes them feel defeated. I'm not yet at that level but it's true, a 10-pack ball point pens at $1 makes very little sense if you knew.