Since it seems to be aimed at getting more manufacturers involved in order to increase supply, I'm surprised that e14 isn't using the embest one for this.
Still, a price increase is dubious at best. The BBB is already more expensive than the more capable OLinuXino-LIME and it won't take much to push it into head to head competition with e14's RIoT board.
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.
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.
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.
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.
