ESP8266 Community Forum

- Mon Jul 30, 2018 4:28 am #77481 I'm going to be Cpt BuzzKill here, but unfortunately you are on the back foot very early on trying to charge $50 for what I can see adds nothing new to the table, and is just a bare PCB without a housing even.

Sonoff's are amazingly cheap, and have a lot of additional product integrations, for eg: Amazon Echo.

- Mon Jul 30, 2018 5:10 am #77482

I'm going to be Cpt BuzzKill here, but unfortunately you are on the back foot very early on trying to charge $50 for what I can see adds nothing new to the table, and is just a bare PCB without a housing even.

Sonoff's are amazingly cheap, and have a lot of additional product integrations, for eg: Amazon Echo.

Yep, I made that point also. In addition, what innovation or novelty does this bring? It really is misguided to have spent 2 years R&D (OP's quote) on a rehash of something already for sale. You could have just copied the Chinese verbatim. This is, of course, what the Chinese do of the West's products.
As I have said before, it is a personal achievement to design and get something to market, but likely in vain, due to a commercial flop, then it is a failure. You will have wasted 2 years of your life, and presumably your money too. In Britain we have learned to our detriment, that product/engineering excellence does not translate into a viable product that makes money.

- Wed Aug 01, 2018 3:33 pm #77531 Thanks Everyone for the feedback. To talk to the 2 years this has been a side project. Owning an engineering firm you don't often get to play with your own designs as I'm producing boards for other people full time. This device is self declared CE Directive A. It use ROHS parts, an FCC certified radio, it uses protected voltages. The Main's are fuesd, PTC on DC voltages, header pins for expansion and programming. The price is high because of the platform. The sparkfun GroupGets venture takes 20% off the top. There are also credit card processing and NRE charges for a CM to build these boards that have to be accounted for in the initial production batch. It's a chicken and Egg syndrome producing boards for production. I can't go selling a product to sparkfun that is made in my home and soldered by hand. It needs to come from manufacture and done scalable and produceable. If the device sells on group gets sparkfun will more then likely lower the cost to reflect there qty of scale. The people that buy the first 25 are obviously not going to be getting the best price for something that does what it does but they are supporting a startup venture and getting the design into production and getting a professional built unit.

I love the SonOff's I have a few of them but I don't trust them to run anything safely. If you check your routing traffic they are always phoning home to china unless you put your own code on them. There is no fuse protection on the Mains. They do not comply with CE Mains isolation requirements or UL Mains Isolation and protection requirements of AC/DC isolation. They do not use a FCC or RU certified radio setup. A lot of speculation in CE.

To summarize it was a hobby project I talked to sparkfun and GroupGets about in passing conversations and they both liked it and asked me to run this campaign. I respect everyones opinion and to purchase which ever units people what but what I ask is forums are designed to be positive and supporting not put down the start up for trying to compete with China and some people will find value in knowing they have someone that can support them while using the product.

- Thu Aug 02, 2018 12:08 am #77532 Just to correct some misinformation. Sonoff does have a FCC certification for their US targetted product. Sonoff make different product and some are designed the US market, some for UK requirements, and elsewhere. (different plugs for different countries, different electrical standards) The FCC certification is for the complete product. Not just for a minimal limited certification of the wifi module.

https://fccid.io/2AE2J-S31

Sonoff design their own power supply because they have the enginearing ability. Sonoff does not use FCC approved radio modules. They design the radio right into the pcb as would be expected by any volume manufacture. Modules are for hobbyists and small volume builders.