Green moves to greener pastures

John Beetem wrote:

 

$395 is pretty steep for building a community.

Most boardmakers haven't yet taken that mental leap into the new pricing world of Pi and STM32F4-Discovery.

Nor into the needs of enthusiasts and the rising maker community.  And the phrase "open source hardware" is not even on their radar.  Democratization of the means of production still has a long way to go.

Although it's still pie in the sky currently, the ability of 3D printers to print proper PCBs really can't come soon enough.

Morgaine.

Morgaine,

  you wrote:

"Absolutely nothing will fix the perceived problems and reduce the need for support as effectively as making Pi available ex-stock."

If they had a proven design, I would completely agree with you.  But they don't. 

There was essentially no beta testing, just 10 betas auctioned as collector's items.

The "troubleshooting" forum at rpi.org has 323 topics at the moment, and rising quickly.

There is a support cost for dealing with returned boards, and boards that won't boot,

run hot, only work when cold, only work when warm, have non-working USB or ethernet, etc.

So one needs to balance the support costs of managing a waiting list if the ramp is too slow,

vs the support costs of product defects if the ramp is too fast.

Any reputable parts distributor should not have the slightest problem managing a waiting list.

They do it all the time, since products are routinely back ordered.  Any CEO who told their

board of directors that the company couldn't properly manage a waiting list, months after the

initial flood of orders, would be quickly looking for a new job, I would think.  Any CEO who

reassured their investors that next year's profits would likely be higher on account of leap year

would not be taken seriously, I would think.

Aye, can't argue with ithe actual hardware support issues that may arise or are arising.  I was referring only to the support issues related to preordering.

Well personally I think that the Foundation's choice of USB chargers as power supplies is a mistake, although that is only with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.  Originally I too thought that it was a great idea, but reality has proven otherwise.  The average charger just isn't made to the right quality.

And the polyfuse issue is another hardware problem, which I believe is a misdesign which exacerbates the problem with poor quality chargers.  I think this should be fixed before many more boards are allowed out into the wild.

Both of these issues are going to add to the support requirement I expect.  I hope that that documented report of the RJ45 with the mis-inserted leg was a one-off, and that poor QA doesn't add further to the support nightmare.  This wide variation in operating temperatures I find particularly worrying -- http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=5898 .

Morgaine.

@John and Morgaine,

I do mean the Zedboard and I don't think that $395 is too bad - sure it would be nice if it were cheaper but if you are going to play with the Zynq you are looking at 1000 hours plus investment so the cost of the board is not such a big issue. The state of maturity of the Zynq and its support stuff suggests to me that Xilinx are not ready for hobby (is there a better word ?) support.

I understand that the design is certainly open source at schematic level so there is nothing to stop you  laying out your own pcb and soldering on the BGA chips yourself.

It won't be less than a 4 layer board so you'll need to make a few before it is cheaper than buying the Zedboard.

When the Zynq has been around for a while I expect much cheaper boards to appear - right now AFAIK you won't be able to buy chips through the usual channels until December.

When you compare the pricing of the PI and the STM32F4 Discovery boards with other things you do need to consider all the factors - the Pi is supported by a huge and unusual community effort and at the root of it is a charity. The design work has been done for free by people with other jobs. The Discovery is promotional effort by ST and while I don't know for sure I would think they lose money on every one they sell.

If they (Pi and Discovery) represent the 'new pricing world' in general I'll eat my hat !

Michael Kellett

Michael Kellett wrote:

 

If they (Pi and Discovery) represent the 'new pricing world' in general I'll eat my hat !

Better clean that hat up a bit, in case millinery cuisine becomes mandatory.

It's the 'new pricing world' in the sense that Pi and Discovery have made it abundantly plain to board manufacturers that when the price is brought down to this extremely low level, then purchase volumes go absolutely astronomic because every man and their dog buys one or several just on a whim, even without any good reason for it.  Budgetary considerations simply no longer apply, it's below the magic trigger point where rational $$ decision making is engaged.  Aka. 'the petty cash effect' or 'beer money'.

Given this precedent, board manufacturers are faced with the rather bleak knowledge that they have only themselves to blame for low sales when they price their lovely new product at $395.  It just seems such a waste of effort to design a nice new board that has the purpose of exposing a chip widely through easy prototyping, and then failing to achieve wide exposure through using an inept pricing model.  Their choice, their fail.

Morgaine.

I think it remains to be proven that the RPi's low-margin distribution model

is sustainable.  Farnell's selling price is normally substantially higher than

their build cost, to allow for overhead and profit.  For the RPi, they are not

touting its profit potential, but instead are hoping it will bring in new customers.

"The firm is one of two exclusive distributors of a popular British designed

credit card-sized computer named Raspberry Pi, which is seeing increasing

demand from around the globe and winning Premier Farnell new customers."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/15/premierfarnell-idUSL5E8EF0KN20120315

It's difficult to sustain such a policy without your other manufacturing partners

demanding a similar deal.

It's easily sustainable, coder27.

You have to remember that the BOM cost for a mere 10,000 units was below $25 and $35 resp., and even at that low volume there was sufficient price headroom to ensure that the Foundation's funders would not lose their houses or whatever they put up as collateral.

At the current levels of production which are at least one order of magnitude higher than 10K, the equation changes markedly as BOM costs plummet through volume ordering, and RS / Farnell certainly aren't doing this for charity.  There's a lot of profit involved, and even higher profits ahead when the numbers rise by further orders of magnitude for education.

All they have to do in order to be smiling all the way to the bank is to keep their support costs down.  That they can do pretty easily as we've discussed above, as long as they don't dawdle too long on making changes to the Foundation's original design which would lead to excessive support calls if left as is.

Morgaine.

> RS / Farnell certainly aren't doing this for charity.  There's a lot of profit involved

we'll see.  the Q1 2012 financial statements (Feb-Apr) are due around 15 June,

3 days after Bain takes over. 

My intuition is that if there was a lot of profit, Farnell would be paying a lot

of attention to RPi.  But I don't see any indication that they are paying hardly

any attention whatsoever.  Certainly begging them to keep the FAQ, blog,

and download centre current is like pulling teeth, and there is essentially

no administrator participation in these forums, despite lots of #helpme tags.

I don't see any evidence that anyone at Farnell is even thinking about the

hard decisions, such as how and when to modify the design to achieve residential

FCC compliance, or to improve the robustness of the design. 

Michael Kellett wrote:

I do mean the Zedboard and I don't think that $395 is too bad...

Thank you for the quick reply.  US$395 may be good or bad, depending on what's on the board.  However, I agree with Morgaine that $395 will cut a lot of individual developers (which includes but is not limited to hobbyists) out of the running, something that is not in Zynq's interest.  I was hoping for something more like $89 for Avnet's Spartan-6 LX9 MicroBoard, but would have settled for $149 like the BeagleBoard.  US$149 is kind of a magic number for individual developers, as many find it an amount they can spend without Spousal Approval.  Given that Zynq likes to tout its "starting price below $15" [Xcell Journal 2Q2011], $395 for a community board to be supported by zedboard.org surprised me.

... but if you are going to play with the Zynq you are looking at 1000 hours plus investment so the cost of the board is not such a big issue.

Yikes.  That's 1/2 of a full-time year.  If that's true, fuggeddabouddit -- as they say in the Bronx.  In my own case, I'm familiar with cross-compiling ARM for the Cortex-A8 BeagleBoard, have lots of experience with Verilog-based design for Spartan-IIE and -3A, and lots of general embedded device-level programming experience.  I had assumed that the Xilinx ISE that supports the Zynq FPGA would be pretty much the same as ISE 12.2 (what I'm using now for Spartan-3A) and the ARM processor would be pretty much compatible with the CodeSourcery GCC tools I'm using now for BeagleBoard.  If Xilinx has decided to throw a bunch of new tools in place to keep me as far away from their silicon as possible, the result will most likely be that they'll succeed in keeping me far away from their silicon.

The state of maturity of the Zynq and its support stuff suggests to me that Xilinx are not ready for hobby (is there a better word ?) support.

I would suggest the phrase "not ready for a large number of developers".  Your comment reminds me way too much of Xilinx's Virtex-II Pro family which incorporated both FPGA logic and IBM PowerPC core(s).  I've heard Virtex-II Pro was not very successful.  We considered it at one time until we saw the pricing, which IIRC was at least US$100 per chip.  So we were much better off with a $10 embedded PowerPC plus a $16 Spartan-IIE, communicating using PCI.  I heard the Virtex-II Pro tools had a lot of challenges, and that you had to successfully configure the FPGA before you could talk to the PowerPC, so you couldn't use the PowerPC to help debug the FPGA.  I think this has been fixed in the Zynq, i.e., you can boot the ARM processor which can then load the FPGA logic.

When the Zynq has been around for a while I expect much cheaper boards to appear -- right now AFAIK you won't be able to buy chips through the usual channels until December.

I guess I'll wait then -- and also find out if Zynq is worth waiting for.

Ah well, it's academic anyway.  Although we enjoy playing with sexy new chips, I would never recommend heading down a road that belongs to a single vendor, on principle.