4 ms·
Of course. I meant that once you have your product working, if you see 2GB is more than enough you can save a bunch of money in production without spending much
by tiagod 2y ago
Of course. I meant that once you have your product working, if you see 2GB is more than enough you can save a bunch of money in production without spending much or any extra time.
Moving your product to an MCU, even when it would support it well (which is not the case for a lot of RPi uses) will usually be a lengthy endeavor. But it's just HN being HN, I guess.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoLike everything else, it depends. Here's an example. A few years ago I was contracted to build a device that would input some data, do real time signal processing, and output the data in a different format. The quickest and probably cheapest way to get it done was to use a $15 analog chip to do the bulk of the processing. I based that board on an Arduino Nano (clone, of course!). A year or two later, much faster microcontrollers like ESP32 had arduino support and were trivial to use. A single ESP32 would probably have replaced most of the other components on my board, reduced inventory required, reduced power consumption and a host of other benefits. But I never bothered because there was no economic pressure to do so. I was selling a $300 device to a single customer who didn't care about the price, and I had better things to do with my time than redesign a board that worked perfectly. TBH, if I wanted to, I could probably have increased the price of the current board by the same amount that redesigning with an ESP32 would have gained me. This is one reason I avoid consumer products like the plague. I'd rather work with people to whom there's no effective difference in cost between $300 hardware and $700 hardware because the benefit to them far exceeds what I'm charging. I guess I'm agreeing with you :-)