I would add Project Ara to this list. The technologies being developed to make the modular phone (eg network on a board with UniPro) has the potential to drastically change the way companies design and fab all sorts of electronic devices.
241 karma · joined July 8, 2009
He has a surprisingly interesting idea that the shaft of periodic wooden panels may be an ancient viking ship buried vertically.
My own vote is for sinkhole + telephone game/hype machine.
Without breaking down everything piece by piece, we spend about 3.00$ in plastic and other headers on a medium qty design that looks about comparable to what theyre doing (i/o wise). Also, female 1/10" headers are quite a bit more expensive than male, which I think skewed my intuition a bit.
Add in the passives and other junk, and leave out the ethernet module and we are talking about a bill of materials of close to $20.
Now add 1.75 for the PCB (qty 5000), 2.50$ for assembly, another $2.00 for testing, packaging and assorted costs (like shipping raw materials and finished goods to and from china, since US assembly and PCB costs are at least 3 times what I noted) and the bare per-unit cost is $25.
Dont forget to factor in costs like - uhh - keeping the lights on in their officepartment - and even if their dev time is free they just cant sell that product for $25 without outside cash subsidizing the whole thing.
In this business, distributors pretty much demand the product at 25-40% discount, so if they want to be in shops and catalogs, you have to factor that in as well.
Consider the raw cost per arduino is probably around 10.50$, they sell 100,000 units a year, and their onboard processor is about 1$ and they have less overall plastic, passives, and other overhead parts than this thing.
There are some other products out there running .NET runtimes and basic real time OSs as well, but these have not really caught on.
Add an operating system into the mix, and as you said its a whole different ball game. That said, 700MHz is a lot of room to try and add a real-time Arduino style layer with access to GPIOs and such. You probably wont get 1MHz real time, but you can probably get 100KHz real time, which is fine for MOST things. Plus you get a network stack, and a display driver, etc. etc. to boot. Of course it cant be done for $25 (that is silly unless the project is nonprofit AND subsidized with charity or advertising dollars), but I would believe $70.
The software for such a device would not be anywhere near trivial to get right, but there is a neat product in there somewhere that a team of 3 or 4 could probably get going rather swiftly.
Of course, on a Maple or an FPGA you can really get crazy - with output timings accurate into the 36MHz and 150MHz range (respectively).
the $25 price point is out of the question unless: A) They sell at or VERY near cost B) They sell advertising on the PCB C) They are subsidized by a tech vendor selling them parts at a discount D) They are subsidized by a charity or an angel E) They are planning on making 100,000 units in one shot.
At least SEVERAL of the above have to be true, or the $25 is just made-up nonsense.
I work at LeafLabs, we are responsible for a 72MHz, open/libre licensed, ARM microcontroller platform called Maple.
The header spacing issue on Arduino was really a gaff! We actually provide a 1/10" compatible secondary header as a rough-fix on Maple. We get tons of use out of this!
Maple line boards are based on the 32-bit ARM Cortex M3 processor core. These low power procs don't have MMUs, so unlike ARM9, there is no hard linux (there is uClinux though).
Maple originally forked the Arduino IDE, and ported most of the Arduino libraries over to ARM. Our build environment also works from the command line via make, arm-gcc, etc. Check everything codewise out at github.com/leaflabs
mBed is another great Cortex M3 platform, here are some differences between mBed and Maple: - mBed is a bit faster at 96MHz, and uses a processor from NXP, leaflabs uses a 72MHz processor from ST (stm32 series) that can actually be overclocked to 120MHz (not recommended ;)
- the LeafLabs build environment runs on your local machine, everything is MIT/LGPL licensed, and can be used with an Arduino-like IDE. The hardware is all creative commons licensed. mBed has a great development IDE, but it is a webapp and compilation happens remotely. I dont know how much of toolchain/libs/hardware on mBed is libre or even open source.
- Maple comes in 3 form factors, Arduino compatible, bread-board sized (maple-mini), and a beefier version (Maple Native).
- mBed has a secondary microcontroller onboard to handle programming, meaning user programs have 100% control of the main MCU (no bootloader or anything else running in the background). Maple has an onboard bootloader and a USB->serial driver running in the background.
(note, mBed has a 60MHz arm 7 board available now too)