Hacker News Reader

Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

They link to a $15 developer board on Aliexpress (much the same as the rest of the ESP developer boards floating around for years) which is now inflated to $35 with tax, shipping, and tariff.

My impulse purchase has been tempered with "eh, do I really need it?"

View on HN

Don't confuse people. It's only like that in a single country that seems hell bent on making itself not matter that much anymore.

Even $15 is on the high end for Espressif dev boards. Not that it's saying much.

If all you need is Zigbee/BLE and a few IO pins, an nRF52840 dongle is still $10 on DigiKey.

These are ones actually made by Espressif and limit is one per person (presumably supply issues as they ramp up mass production), certainly there will be dozens of clones soon.

Fortunately it’s only £16.40 with VAT and shipping to the UK. Approx $21.85. Comparable to the £9 M5Stack AtomS3 Lite (ESP32-S3) I picked up from Pi Hut recently.

This should help all the US-based RISC-V microcontroller companies though, right? /s

Finally all the mom and pop chip fabs running out of a garage get a fighting chance.

Can't wait to buy from some west coast hipster with a garage fab now that it's economically viable. /s

But wouldn't it be cool if that were a thing? Miniaturized fab tech that some extreme tech hipster could produce bespoke chips out of the garage?

I wonder if you gave the right people a billion dollars what the best garage sized fab they could develop could do.

The really criminal thing is it only costs $8.43 to mail that thing from China to your house in the USA... it likely would cost you more to mail that same item to yourself from yourself.

That alone puts US-based sellers at a mega disadvantage compared to cheap Chinese goods - and it's not a good thing.

>The really criminal thing is it only costs $8.43 to mail that thing from China to your house in the USA... it likely would cost you more to mail that same item to yourself from yourself.

These things are tiny and very cheap to ship. I could probably pack 40 of them into a USPS flat rate box shipped anywhere in the US for $9.30.

This was a decent argument when you could get things shipped from China for $0.50, but not now or in this case.

Yeah if I were mailing a single one of these to myself I bet I could get away dropping it in a regular envelope with maybe an extra stamp. (Assuming they come without the headers soldered on like most of the clones I’ve got from AliExpress, RIP).

Most of my Aliexpress electronics orders are shipped to a local US Aliexpress distribution center which then mails them locally. These come in small padded envelopes which are not expensive to ship.

Well they all get made in China, why should i need to pay a US middleman

Reply on news.ycombinator.com