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> Gertboard is packaged as a kit. It doesn’t come preassembled; you will have to solder it together yourself. I hope it won't take to long until there will be
by FrojoS 14y ago
> Gertboard is packaged as a kit. It doesn’t come preassembled; you will have to solder it together yourself.
I hope it won't take to long until there will be pre-assembled ones, too. For an open source design, all you need is someone who invests some money to get the board assembled in China and then sells it in a web store.
Here is an example, to show how affordable assembling low quantities of boards in China has become. For one of our designs, buying all the parts online in the US or Switzerland, was about $150. If you buy about a dozen of them in China, they are about the same price point. But then, they are already assembled according to our design! Once you buy around one hundred, you save considerable money. In our case, the offer we got is about $100 per board (33% savings!).
The lower the transaction cost, the better. If you think soldering has minimal transaction cost, compare the price of a soldering station with a Raspberry Pi.
- LiveTheDream 14y agoThat is quite a savings. The Chinese-assembled boards can have a defect rate of up to 50% and still be competitive with the original price (ignoring time lost and extra shipping charges).
- jberryman 14y agoNot to contradict your point, but this board should be easy to assemble as a first project with an investment in <$20 of soldering equipment and supplies. So I'd encourage anyone who's interested in this but new to electronics to head over to sparkfun and just dive in and see how you like it.
- veemjeem 14y agoEasy? Not so... this is not a beginner's kit, there are surface mount components, and if this is your first time soldering, it's gonna be a rough day. Sparkfun does a really good job of making their kits easy. If you look closely at them, the boards that require diodes and electrolytic capacitors have a picture printed on the pcb that make it really obvious what the polarity is. The gertboard pcb doesn't have any of these. If you solder a led backwards, you're SOL. So if you haven't seen a diode or led before, you probably shouldn't pick the gertboard as a first project. You can buy the arduino as a kit, but most people who are just starting out with electronics will get one prebuilt so they don't accidentally stick their atmega chip in backwards.
- tcdent 14y agoI don't see anything but through-hole components here, and I don't think anyone would encourage a beginner to dive into a surface mounted design as their first project. http://www.element14.com/community/themes/images/raspberrypi/gertboard_400straight.gif http://www.element14.com/community/themes/images/raspberrypi...
- veemjeem 14y agoThat's because your picture is too small to see the surface mount stuff :-) See this larger picture: http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/image002.png http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/image0... Or read the assembly manual where they teach how to solder surface mount components. There's a bunch of resistors & capacitors all over the board that happen to be surface mount. http://www.element14.com/community/servlet/JiveServlet/downloadBody/48916-102-1-256003/Gertboard_Assembly_Manual_Rev1.1_F.pdf http://www.element14.com/community/servlet/JiveServlet/downl...
- jberryman 14y agoAh, well I retract my statement, but only because of the SMD parts.