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Another manufacturer for BBB

bwelsby

Just seen Embest (a Farnell company ) is producing their own clone of the  BeagleBone Black

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  • in reply to Former Member

    The shipping rorts used by some suppliers make buying from them impossible to justify.

     

    Thankfully even some of the US based ones have stopped using Fed-Ex as their only option, and the USPS is very efficient (well compared to ours which take longer to travel less distance).

     

    Seeedstudio generally ships via HonKong Post (for free), which can strike problems with customs.

    Thankfully I have never had delays, so both the supplier and my address must be clean as far as customs is concerned. ......image

     

    Also to our credit, we only pay duty if the GST and duty will exceed NZ$50 which means the declared value of the item (inc freight) needs to be $NZ334 or more.

     

    However digging around the NZ element14 site using a previous code resulted in this

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    This makes it NZ$81.63 v $84.14 ( from Seeedstudio (depending on the exchange rate).

    Neither of them have it, so both are probably just as fast.

     

    Iain

    At that rate you could buy two, send them to me and I'll send you a free gift.  ... think early Christmas present.image

     

    Mark

  • in reply to Former Member

    I considered seeed, but in the UK I'd possibly get hit by tax and and additional sum charged by Royal Mail. I ordered a week ago from Farnell, and the expected delivery date is three weeks away. I noticed some e-bay sellers are trying to sell them for £100 knowing there is a demand!

    As we noticed, some companies are using it as a component, rather than creating their own PCB layout. For example someone posted something about NinjaBlocks the other day, and I noticed that internally it seems to be a BeagleBone Black. So things like this are tying up demand to some extent.

     

    EDIT:

    Also, looking through the link that agrahambell posted, there is a message from Gerald which points to the terms of use which states:

    "We DO NOT support the use of the board that we manufacture under the BeagleBoard.org logo in commercial products. Period."

    and

    "WE DID NOT DESIGN THE BOARD FOR USE IN PRODUCTS. We cannot therefore guarantee that it will work in products. We provide NO support for using this board in a product."

     

    I wonder if it is a legal term of the contract, that it can not be used for commercial products.

  • in reply to shabaz

    That's always been there, but I suppose that some people will look at it from the point of view that losing support isn't a big deal.  As Gerald keeps saying, you couldn't build your own BBB for $45 even using their designs (unless you're getting economies of scale by building hundreds of thousands).  So people needing a few hundred up to some thousands are cheaper just buying BBBs and integrating them.

     

    Interesting comment further down the thread was from someone using AM3354 instead of 3358 / 3359 and saving something like 40% just by dropping the two PRUs. Was quite surprised there was that much of a difference, but checking e14 prices shows a surprising difference in the costs of the SoC itself.

  • in reply to shabaz

    shabaz wrote:

     

    I noticed some e-bay sellers are trying to sell them for £100 knowing there is a demand!

    They're not worth that.  The BBW is 66.02+VAT from e14 in the UK for a total just under GBP 80, but they don't seem to sell, the BBB would need to be something very special to justify 20 more.

     

    Somewhere else in that thread Gerald had suggested $75.  Newark.com has the RIoT board for $74, so I'm not sure that a $75 BBB works compared to a board with a better CPU and GPU, twice the memory, twice the eMMC, onboard 4 port usb hub etc for essentially the same price. Especially when you can get a RIoT shipped today.

  • in reply to Former Member

    Looks like we might be getting the Embest one outside China after all, noticed this the other day

     

    image

     

    Mfg is e14, country of origin China and unfortunately includes the previously mentioned price increase image

     

    The RIoT board is £46.55 here in the UK, it has twice the RAM, twice the eMMC, gigabit network, four usb, audio connectors, better CPU, better GPU... the list goes on of ways it offers more than the BBB.  So while I'm sure there will be a certain amount of RPi effect where people will choose the BBB simply because it's a BBB, personally I don't think it'll be quite so simple a choice. 

    The BBB is really good at the original price, but it's competing against a different set of boards at this price.

  • in reply to Former Member

    While it might make financial sense to offer it for this price while supply is still low, I really hope this is not now the permanent price for it for this version. The only people who continue to benefit are those putting the boards to commercial uses, because they would not be able to manufacture it themselves at the higher price anyway, as we saw from that snippet (below) from the link you posted earlier. Individuals and educational users will be heavily impacted. It's a shame, it could have been prevented through better T&C's preventing commercial use for these boards without (say) a license cost.

     

    <ohararp <at> ohararp.com> wrote:

     

    Gerald, I have looked into both producing our own boards and System on Module type platforms with the AM3559 chipset.  The system on module setups are about $125 in quantity with a 12 week leadtime.  To produce our boards it would be a minimum of about $100 pre board to do our own production.  The latter does not factor in parts availibility, capital required, etc.  Finally, if you just look at single chip costs for the AM2559 you are looking at $34 - http://www.ti.com/product/AM3359!  The $45 pricing for the BBB is really unbelieveable and quite possibly unsustainable?  I would have no problem paying $75 for this board if we could guarantee availibility and continued support (ie being able to stay in business).

  • in reply to shabaz

    Somewhere earlier in that rather long thread Gerald had suggested increasing the price to $75  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.hardware.beagleboard.user/62794

     

    xe.com today shows $75 = 44.75 GBP

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    So I'd not rule it out until we see something definitive on exactly what they're going to do.

     

    Either way, if we assume this is the Embest built version rather than the CircuitCo one, then it's all up for grabs. Not being an 'official' version I think lets e14 charge what they want, and people will pay if the official one is unobtainable.

    You are of course right that it's the non-commercial users that suffer most, but that's the trade-off for OSHW when priced at a point that commercial users building their own clones can't come close to matching.

    There was a discussion here a few months back talking about SBC's not being the right answer and that a purpose built design should be used instead. While there may be merit in that point of view, it doesn't work out economically when you can buy a pre-built SBC and use it as a module at a third of the cost of your own design.  That appears to be the problem we're seeing, the BBB hardware is just too good to be true at $45 and the people using it commercially know it.

  • in reply to Former Member

    Price has been updated on the Embest version:

    image

     

    So it now matches the CircuitCo version.

     

    There's also this http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.hardware.beagleboard.user/64767 from Gerald that suggests a move to 4GB eMMC sometime soon.

  • in reply to fustini

    Interesting.. I suspect the Newark stock will be short lived now that you've pointed it out image

     

    I'm curious what e14/embest will do when the CircuitCo rev C arrives.  If they can continue to offer their version at $45 with 2GB eMMC it might take the pressure off.. Or do they match price/features with the CircuitCo version?