Chat freely about anything...

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By RichardS
#862 That's pretty critical :) you get too many excited when they see $3 BOM! the 100K bring it back into perspective :lol:

Richard.
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By jonsmirl
#864 You can get BOM under $4 just by buying a full reel of each component. I see five places offering RT5350 on taobao for $2.00-$2.25 in reel lots. I believe a full reel is 4000 chips. So an expenditure of under $25,000 would get you 4,000 modules.

But... if you are going to build 4,000 of something that is not a development board, it is better just to build it and not use a module.

Vocore made a decent profit on this (but he still hasn't shipped). Vocore is one man company.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/voco ... -with-wifi

I'm guessing he cleared an average of $10 an order times 2,951 orders = $30,000. Not a great profit for the amount of work involved. He still has to put 2,591 orders into boxes, address and mail them. Plus Indiegogo takes 9% (?) before he sees anything.

Bottom line - these RT5350/ MT7620/ AR9331 based systems are like 100x more powerful than a ESP8266. So if you are building something complex - use one of these chips, not a ESP8266. These chips all run Linux. So you can easily run a web server, python, SSH, UPNP media server, USB camera, USB Z-wave, USB BLE, etc, etc..... All straight out of the box using OpenWRT plus some other open source code. It is like comparing an Arduino to a Beaglebone.
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By wififofum
#866 Yeah but don't those ICs require special RF test/calibration equipment?

I mean you can blink an led from a JVM if you want. I like the idea of maximizing the potential of the esp8266. I know you said complex, but most iot things aren't complex.