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clone relies on hardware being designed and software written - this takes a lot of money, so you can't just count the final price of parts as the price. Arduin

clone relies on hardware being designed and software written - this takes a lot of money, so you can't just count the final price of parts as the price. Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.

pclmulqdq 1y ago
A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Give it a week to include debugging. Amortize that cost over a million units and engineering time comes out to less than one cent per board.
- shadowpho 1y ago
  It’s not quite that easy, and besides the hard part is the SW. arduino spent years writing SW code and still does to make it easy to run, debug issues and provide support. Also a million dev kits is unrealistic for vast majority of companies 5-20k is more the number I hard.
  - drzaiusx11 1y ago
    To be frank, the Arduino ide was a fork of Processing's and the compiler suite was GCC. They 'simply' glued the pre-existing pieces together. I'm not saying that it's trivial to do that but it's also not exactly a herculean task. Even the bootloader was a fork of Hernando Barragán's pre-existing Wiring project.
    - shadowpho 1y ago
      >but it's also not exactly a herculean task. To me it sounds like maybe 10 software engineers for a year. You gotta do a bootloader, test it out thoroughly, setup compiler to work, glue all the pieces together, write the missing pieces, test it all some more… It’s expensive…
- RealityVoid 1y ago
  > A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Hah! I like to underestimate scope as well, but this is really something else. Definitely a competent engineer could make something like this. But a couple of months maybe. You won't even read the documentation for the chip in a day.
  - pclmulqdq 1y ago
    Have you seen the schematics for these boards? They are exceptionally simple. Many devkits are much more complicated. I have actually done embedded engineering in the past and I was being generous with "a day." Skimming a datasheet is a skill and it certainly will not take a day to get the information you need off of it.
    - RealityVoid 1y ago
      If you mean the HW alone... Still over a day. If you mean the software to go along it, a couple orders of magnitude more. Even the simplest peripherals can bite back if you are not careful and you don't test the edge cases. AVR's are indeed quite simple, but if you try to build stuff other people will use, things need to be polished. I actually do embedded engineering. I'm doing it right now! More on the SW side than the PCB design side, and, again, this is quite an exaggeration from your side, saying you could do it in a day.
      - shermantanktop 1y ago
        The estimate isn’t right, but the direction is right— there just aren’t that many discrete components on these boards. The chips themselves contain capabilities that an embedded designer would otherwise need to design. I’m not sure there’s much further to go, since much of what isn’t on the chipset is power related.
        RealityVoid 1y ago
        I agree. The estimate I was contesting. Also, we somewhat were talking past each other because I see these boards as an ensemble, HW+SW. So I was thinking about the time to make both. I agree that the boards have few discrete components and the PCB's are relatively simple.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  I have been modifying Arduino libraries for weeks, there is much more work in them than just a single day. Granted replacing the Arduino IDE with Autoconf took 3 days. (2 and a half of which were spend on analyzing what the IDE does.)

pclmulqdq 1y ago

A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Give it a week to include debugging. Amortize that cost over a million units and engineering time comes out to less than one cent per board.

shadowpho 1y ago
It’s not quite that easy, and besides the hard part is the SW. arduino spent years writing SW code and still does to make it easy to run, debug issues and provide support. Also a million dev kits is unrealistic for vast majority of companies 5-20k is more the number I hard.
- drzaiusx11 1y ago
  To be frank, the Arduino ide was a fork of Processing's and the compiler suite was GCC. They 'simply' glued the pre-existing pieces together. I'm not saying that it's trivial to do that but it's also not exactly a herculean task. Even the bootloader was a fork of Hernando Barragán's pre-existing Wiring project.
  - shadowpho 1y ago
    >but it's also not exactly a herculean task. To me it sounds like maybe 10 software engineers for a year. You gotta do a bootloader, test it out thoroughly, setup compiler to work, glue all the pieces together, write the missing pieces, test it all some more… It’s expensive…
RealityVoid 1y ago
> A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Hah! I like to underestimate scope as well, but this is really something else. Definitely a competent engineer could make something like this. But a couple of months maybe. You won't even read the documentation for the chip in a day.
- pclmulqdq 1y ago
  Have you seen the schematics for these boards? They are exceptionally simple. Many devkits are much more complicated. I have actually done embedded engineering in the past and I was being generous with "a day." Skimming a datasheet is a skill and it certainly will not take a day to get the information you need off of it.
  - RealityVoid 1y ago
    If you mean the HW alone... Still over a day. If you mean the software to go along it, a couple orders of magnitude more. Even the simplest peripherals can bite back if you are not careful and you don't test the edge cases. AVR's are indeed quite simple, but if you try to build stuff other people will use, things need to be polished. I actually do embedded engineering. I'm doing it right now! More on the SW side than the PCB design side, and, again, this is quite an exaggeration from your side, saying you could do it in a day.
    - shermantanktop 1y ago
      The estimate isn’t right, but the direction is right— there just aren’t that many discrete components on these boards. The chips themselves contain capabilities that an embedded designer would otherwise need to design. I’m not sure there’s much further to go, since much of what isn’t on the chipset is power related.
      - RealityVoid 1y ago
        I agree. The estimate I was contesting. Also, we somewhat were talking past each other because I see these boards as an ensemble, HW+SW. So I was thinking about the time to make both. I agree that the boards have few discrete components and the PCB's are relatively simple.
1718627440 1y ago
I have been modifying Arduino libraries for weeks, there is much more work in them than just a single day. Granted replacing the Arduino IDE with Autoconf took 3 days. (2 and a half of which were spend on analyzing what the IDE does.)