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Comment by mrheosuper | Hacker News Reader

I’m sad that it uses the Uno Q. I really dislike the uno Q, since it uses QC SoC, which means no cheap Chinese clone, which is not very accessible to everyone.

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I'm not sure any of the other Arduino platforms would be able to do the computer vision parts this appears to.

The cheap Chinese clones don't have to pay for any of the software that Arduino develops so yeah it makes sense they can sell them for cheaper.

this is built by Arduino specifically to sell more Uno Q. You want them to start promoting clones? What product do you make and we'll promote clones of those too.

PC?

An Uno Q is like $60. So what % are you gonna save on the whole project by using a Chinese knockoff?

A lot. The official uno r3 is around $30 while the clone can be as cheap as $5.

Which does not sound much, but to someone living in less developed country, that matters a lot

On a $1000 hacker project that's only a 2% percent cost increase.

In most of the world $1000 is startup capital, not a hobby project

Regardless of where you live - you're not building a household robot for much less than that.

This isn’t a household robot. It’s barely a robot at all. It can’t move itself. It can pivot its head and move its “arms “ on one axis, but it can’t manipulate anything at all.

It’s a poorly made “AI” camera without decent audio with two fake arms that can kind of gesticulate but not do anything, that looks like a much cooler robot than it is.

This can be built with a a BOM cost of around $30 total, plus 3d printing filament. I know because one of the things we are building actually has a similar processor with an npu as well as an esp32 with wifi/BT and mcu functionality, SD card, camera, 9dof gyro/mag, barometric sensor, mic, audio amplifier and speaker, as well as a 1500 pixel SPAD sensor. Cheap servos are $3 each.

Actually to build this and get image recognition you could just use a esp32-p4/c6 module and run it in python without Linux, BOM cost more like $20

Not every project costs $1000. In fact, most arduino project i saw cost less than $200 in BOM.

I’m sure the Arduino isn’t the only thing you’d save money on with this approach. Keeping the same ratios, it’s a 600% cost increase.

Chinese clones of Arduinos are normally between 3x-6x cheaper, and if your project uses dozens or hundreds or thousands of them, especially in developing countries, that's a major price delta.

I assume at those scales it quickly becomes economical to design a custom board instead of using modules that are probably seated on cheap custom PCBs anyways.

If you have a bit of time to learn the skills, it’s economical to design a custom board even for 5-10 units. An integrated controller module like an ESP32 can basically just be plonked onto a board with a voltage regulator and used like an Arduino.

Board or not, it's the chip here that is expensive.

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