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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

Why don't you guys just use a Beaglebone Black ($50), M2M cape (http://www.yantrr.com/products/m2m-cape-for-beaglebone), and a thermal printer (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10438). BOM for that, plus project enclosure, is like $200. That's also just after a bit of quick googling...there's bound to be a much cheaper solution.

What's your price point for hardware?

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We are at about $200 now for hardware. We have a custom PCB and 3d printed case. We also have an LCD and some control knobs in the mix. Checking out the Beaglebone stuff now...very interesting since there is basically no 3G/4G modems for Arduino right now...

I'm just curious why the default response is still to reach for an Arduino--much more powerful SoC chips are cheap these days.

For us, the reason is that my co-founder and I (both are not hardware guys) were able to build a proof of concept in my garage and Arduino seemed like the best (easiest) choice. Since then, we hired a hardware guy who designed a custom PCB etc. HTTPS would be great but we don't transmit any personal data so it's not a high priority right now.

> HTTPS would be great but we don't transmit any personal data so it's not a high priority right now.

You are sending people's orders around the web. I'd consider that "personal".

None-the-less, use SSL, there is little reason not to use it these days. And as others have pointed out, it's the only good and easy way to guarantee what you send to one of these printers is what it actually received (no carrier tampering of your packets, etc).

Just use SSL.

If SSL isn't supported by the Arduino chipset, then that sounds like more than a "little" reason not to use it. That sounds like it might be an "it would be a whole lot of work" reason not to use it.

(I don't actually know how much work would be involved, but goleksiak says they would really like to use it, so I assume it's not trivial.)

SSL on the Arduino--usually a little 8-bit (!) chip--is a bit resource intensive, in both memory and processing time.

Hey, no worries. Real artists ship. :)

larger pool of cheap developers, and a hook onto an ongoing popular trend (arduino gizmodery), cheap prototyping.

Yeah, like any number of Olimex parts. Or a Raspberry Pi Model A.

One reason to still use an Arduino is realtime. The arduino's minimalist OS is realtime by default, but the BBB runs non-realtime Debian. They might need RT timings for the printer interface? You can add realtime linux extensions to BBB, but it's not a beginner task -- basically rolling your own Linux installation and writing your app as a kernel module. You can also use the PRU on the BBB to get insane RT performance, but you'll have to code it in assembly. I love the BBB, but Arduino is still an easier package for simple realtime.

if you buy a batch of beaglebones from adafruit.com or another, perhaps larger mid-tier distributor, you can likely get a discount per unit.

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