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Though it is cool to see a minute FPGA dev board, I don't see the value proposition here. At $45, it is too expensive to use in a product. What is the killer ap

Though it is cool to see a minute FPGA dev board, I don't see the value proposition here. At $45, it is too expensive to use in a product. What is the killer app for this board? One can get a significantly more powerful Tang Nano 20K [1] kit on Amazon right now for $31 [2]. [1] wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/tang/tang-nano-20k/nano-20k.html [2] https://www.amazon.com/youyeetoo-Sipeed-Development-RISC-V-Embedded/dp/B0C8N2DMJY/ https://www.amazon.com/youyeetoo-Sipeed-Development-RISC-V-E...

fhfjfk 2y ago
I think it's to add logic to an existing COTS device. Say you have a widget that both writes log files to an SD and reads a command script from that SD. With this FPGA card, you could implement logic that changes the command script based on the content of the logs.
- utopcell 2y ago
  No you can't, there's no meaningful storage on this pcb. Besides, you could do the same with a dirt-cheap rp2040 or similar cpu. What's the FPGA added value?
Lerc 2y ago
Custom hardware has always been hard and expensive. It's really amazing that this can be done for just $45. Playing with tech like this is usually for the appeal of it in itself, which is what makes the price worth paying. That said, It would be nice to know the cost breakdown and what kind of price could ultimately be achieved if someone came up with a use that needed 10,000 of these. I kind of like the idea of a tiny game console that had something like a RP2040 inside and these were its game cartridges. Use an actual microSD for purely software games, and the FPGA for cool experimental stuff.
- utopcell 2y ago
  It's really not anymore. It's trivial to make cheap PCBs and PCB assembly is even free in most cases (checkout jlcpcb.com for example).
  - iamflimflam1 2y ago
    To have any chance of having someone distribute your product you need to give them at least 40% margin. If you are using a distributor in the US (which crowd supply is), and manufacturing in China, you need to pay a 20% import tariff. For them to sell in the EU you need CE certification (depending on what you need this can cost thousands of dollars). To sell on the US you may need FCC certification - again this can cost thousands of dollars. There’s a reason why there’s a big difference between the cost price and actual selling price of products. And with small production runs, this difference will always be big. I currently have a campaign live on crowd supply. It quickly became clear to me when I started to crunch the numbers that my initial price point was ludicrously low. https://www.crowdsupply.com/cmg-research/esp32-rainbow https://www.crowdsupply.com/cmg-research/esp32-rainbow
    - utopcell 2y ago
      Hi Christopher, I'm a big fan of your speccy project and I hope it gets funded. To your points: > To have any chance of having someone distribute your product you need to give them at least 40% margin. It depends on the distributor. I just checked Amazon's calculator, and they seem to be charging $3.4 fees and $4.2 fulfillment fees for a unit sold at $30. > For them to sell in the EU you need CE certification (depending on what you need this can cost thousands of dollars). > To sell on the US you may need FCC certification - again this can cost thousands of dollars. These are not really applicable for devices sold as kits or for development though, which is the case here. > It quickly became clear to me when I started to crunch the numbers that my initial price point was ludicrously low. You made some iffy decisions for your project IMHO. Why add an LCD or WiFi? Out of curiosity, I specced out a similar project on JLCPCB that has a full-color UV printed PCB, an RP2040, HDMI out, a microSD and 40 tactile switches. A fully-functional speccy. The per-unit cost, including PCB assembly and shipment to CA was $3.6. Using capacitive touching would barely increase that price. Let's budget for some non-working boards and call it $4 per unit. There's a long road from that to $99.
      - iamflimflam1 2y ago
        Your initial comment and your responses are things I see all the time. And to be fair, until I started trying to sell things, I would have exactly the same reaction. "It's just a PCB and a few components - why are they charging so much!". My response is always: Everything I do is open source. I publish the schematics, PCB layout, Gerber files and BOM. You are more than welcome to get it manufactured yourself with whoever you like to use. No one is forcing you to buy from me. You can probably do it cheaper than what can realistically be charged by someone selling on Tindie or elsewhere. Actually selling hardware is really difficult, the margins are not great and all it takes are a few items lost in the post or people demanding refunds to make it a non-starter. I know quite a few people who have given up on it as - it simply isn't worth the effort. To address your points directly: >> For them to sell in the EU you need CE certification (depending on what you need this can cost thousands of dollars). > To sell on the US you may need FCC certification - again this can cost thousands of dollars. > These are not really applicable for devices sold as kits or for development though, which is the case here. This is a very common misconception. There is no official carve out for "kits or development boards". This is why Raspberry Pi boards are all CE certified. A lot of people get away with it, and it can save a lot of money. But if you want to do things properly and be safe then you need to do it. > You made some iffy decisions for your project IMHO. Why add an LCD or WiFi? It sounds like what I've made is not something that you are interested in - I did link to a number of alternatives from the crowd funding page. There are plenty of options. One that seems to match what you are talking about is this one: https://www.tindie.com/products/bobricius/picozx-handheld-zx-spectrum-128k-other-8bits/ https://www.tindie.com/products/bobricius/picozx-handheld-zx... - $138 for the fully assembled version. > I specced out a similar project on JLCPCB that has a full-color UV printed PCB, an RP2040, HDMI out, a microSD and 40 tactile switches. A fully-functional speccy. The per-unit cost, including PCB assembly and shipment to CA was $3.6. Using capacitive touching would barely increase that price. Let's budget for some non-working boards and call it $4 per unit. There's a long road from that to $99. I took a quick look on JLCPCB. A four layer board of 233x144mm (the size of my boards) with black solder mask and LeadFree HASL (to comply with ROHS) shipping to the UK with taxes and duty prepaid (if anyone is getting PCBs shipped to them I would really recommend this - it avoids any nasty surprises) comes out at a total price of $71.27. That's $14 for the bare boards, no full color silk screen, no components and no SMT assembly. So I'm not sure where you get your $3.60 from... If you are interested in hardware manufacturing then I really would recommend giving it go. It's very educational.
stephen_g 2y ago
Depends what the product is - Obviously it's too pricey for what the FPGA is for mass production, but I've seen development boards that cost a several hundred dollars each (or even a few thousand dollars, depending on the size of the FPGA!) used in low-volume stuff (in the defence sector especially). This is especially the case for large FPGAs because they can be very cheap in quantity, but if you only need one or two dozen, just the chip can be more expensive than the evaluation board, even before the cost of designing and building a custom board!
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  The MiSTer FPGA gaming project also uses devboards and have had trouble locating stock at times.
  - utopcell 2y ago
    Same goes for the ZX Spectrum Next. The engineering team had to redesign the PCB to switch from a Spartan-6 to an Artix-7 between their two Kickstarters.
iamflimflam1 2y ago
People really do not understand how expensive it actually is to do a short production run.

fhfjfk 2y ago

I think it's to add logic to an existing COTS device. Say you have a widget that both writes log files to an SD and reads a command script from that SD. With this FPGA card, you could implement logic that changes the command script based on the content of the logs.

utopcell 2y ago
No you can't, there's no meaningful storage on this pcb. Besides, you could do the same with a dirt-cheap rp2040 or similar cpu. What's the FPGA added value?

Lerc 2y ago

Custom hardware has always been hard and expensive. It's really amazing that this can be done for just $45. Playing with tech like this is usually for the appeal of it in itself, which is what makes the price worth paying. That said, It would be nice to know the cost breakdown and what kind of price could ultimately be achieved if someone came up with a use that needed 10,000 of these. I kind of like the idea of a tiny game console that had something like a RP2040 inside and these were its game cartridges. Use an actual microSD for purely software games, and the FPGA for cool experimental stuff.

utopcell 2y ago
It's really not anymore. It's trivial to make cheap PCBs and PCB assembly is even free in most cases (checkout jlcpcb.com for example).
- iamflimflam1 2y ago
  To have any chance of having someone distribute your product you need to give them at least 40% margin. If you are using a distributor in the US (which crowd supply is), and manufacturing in China, you need to pay a 20% import tariff. For them to sell in the EU you need CE certification (depending on what you need this can cost thousands of dollars). To sell on the US you may need FCC certification - again this can cost thousands of dollars. There’s a reason why there’s a big difference between the cost price and actual selling price of products. And with small production runs, this difference will always be big. I currently have a campaign live on crowd supply. It quickly became clear to me when I started to crunch the numbers that my initial price point was ludicrously low. https://www.crowdsupply.com/cmg-research/esp32-rainbow https://www.crowdsupply.com/cmg-research/esp32-rainbow
  - utopcell 2y ago
    Hi Christopher, I'm a big fan of your speccy project and I hope it gets funded. To your points: > To have any chance of having someone distribute your product you need to give them at least 40% margin. It depends on the distributor. I just checked Amazon's calculator, and they seem to be charging $3.4 fees and $4.2 fulfillment fees for a unit sold at $30. > For them to sell in the EU you need CE certification (depending on what you need this can cost thousands of dollars). > To sell on the US you may need FCC certification - again this can cost thousands of dollars. These are not really applicable for devices sold as kits or for development though, which is the case here. > It quickly became clear to me when I started to crunch the numbers that my initial price point was ludicrously low. You made some iffy decisions for your project IMHO. Why add an LCD or WiFi? Out of curiosity, I specced out a similar project on JLCPCB that has a full-color UV printed PCB, an RP2040, HDMI out, a microSD and 40 tactile switches. A fully-functional speccy. The per-unit cost, including PCB assembly and shipment to CA was $3.6. Using capacitive touching would barely increase that price. Let's budget for some non-working boards and call it $4 per unit. There's a long road from that to $99.
    - iamflimflam1 2y ago
      Your initial comment and your responses are things I see all the time. And to be fair, until I started trying to sell things, I would have exactly the same reaction. "It's just a PCB and a few components - why are they charging so much!". My response is always: Everything I do is open source. I publish the schematics, PCB layout, Gerber files and BOM. You are more than welcome to get it manufactured yourself with whoever you like to use. No one is forcing you to buy from me. You can probably do it cheaper than what can realistically be charged by someone selling on Tindie or elsewhere. Actually selling hardware is really difficult, the margins are not great and all it takes are a few items lost in the post or people demanding refunds to make it a non-starter. I know quite a few people who have given up on it as - it simply isn't worth the effort. To address your points directly: >> For them to sell in the EU you need CE certification (depending on what you need this can cost thousands of dollars). > To sell on the US you may need FCC certification - again this can cost thousands of dollars. > These are not really applicable for devices sold as kits or for development though, which is the case here. This is a very common misconception. There is no official carve out for "kits or development boards". This is why Raspberry Pi boards are all CE certified. A lot of people get away with it, and it can save a lot of money. But if you want to do things properly and be safe then you need to do it. > You made some iffy decisions for your project IMHO. Why add an LCD or WiFi? It sounds like what I've made is not something that you are interested in - I did link to a number of alternatives from the crowd funding page. There are plenty of options. One that seems to match what you are talking about is this one: https://www.tindie.com/products/bobricius/picozx-handheld-zx-spectrum-128k-other-8bits/ https://www.tindie.com/products/bobricius/picozx-handheld-zx... - $138 for the fully assembled version. > I specced out a similar project on JLCPCB that has a full-color UV printed PCB, an RP2040, HDMI out, a microSD and 40 tactile switches. A fully-functional speccy. The per-unit cost, including PCB assembly and shipment to CA was $3.6. Using capacitive touching would barely increase that price. Let's budget for some non-working boards and call it $4 per unit. There's a long road from that to $99. I took a quick look on JLCPCB. A four layer board of 233x144mm (the size of my boards) with black solder mask and LeadFree HASL (to comply with ROHS) shipping to the UK with taxes and duty prepaid (if anyone is getting PCBs shipped to them I would really recommend this - it avoids any nasty surprises) comes out at a total price of $71.27. That's $14 for the bare boards, no full color silk screen, no components and no SMT assembly. So I'm not sure where you get your $3.60 from... If you are interested in hardware manufacturing then I really would recommend giving it go. It's very educational.

stephen_g 2y ago

Depends what the product is - Obviously it's too pricey for what the FPGA is for mass production, but I've seen development boards that cost a several hundred dollars each (or even a few thousand dollars, depending on the size of the FPGA!) used in low-volume stuff (in the defence sector especially). This is especially the case for large FPGAs because they can be very cheap in quantity, but if you only need one or two dozen, just the chip can be more expensive than the evaluation board, even before the cost of designing and building a custom board!

ranger_danger 2y ago
The MiSTer FPGA gaming project also uses devboards and have had trouble locating stock at times.
- utopcell 2y ago
  Same goes for the ZX Spectrum Next. The engineering team had to redesign the PCB to switch from a Spartan-6 to an Artix-7 between their two Kickstarters.

iamflimflam1 2y ago

People really do not understand how expensive it actually is to do a short production run.