PSOC 5LP Hat for a Raspberry Pi

I am the original designer so I have a biased opinion. Hoping maybe I can answer some of the questions/objections above.

Is it worth the money?

It is a bit pricey at $50 (for early backers). The PSoC chip goes (as noted) for around $7. The PCB costs a few dollars (in the under 100 volume), the connectors and hat EEPROM cost another few dollars. It costs around $10 additional to assemble and test the card. So the selling price of $50 is around 2-3x the costs. That's high if it was made in volume and purchased from China. It's not. We build them in my living room. I am going to build around 50 or so of these cards (maybe 100 of them if the Kickstarter goes well) so there's not all that much economy of scale involved. In the end I might end up with $1000 or so profit which will go into my next project.

Why hook up all of the Raspberry Pi GPIO lines?

Think about this one a bit. If you want an input pin connected just connect it inside the PSoC to one of the I/O pins. Same goes for output pins. Just route them through the PSoC. What about Bi-directional pins? Someone mentioned One Wire. The Pi really stinks at interfaces which have specialized timing. You get a packet in on the Ethernet and all of a sudden you are preempted - ouch. That's where the beauty of the PSOC comes in handy. The ARM processor inside the part does a great job in those situations. Try handling the timing of a chain of NeoPixels with the Pi. It's not a great bit-banger. The ARM CPU in the PSOC is great at bit-banging.

Is this just a Marketing Ploy?

Hardly, I'm horrible at Marketing. I just put up projects that I do for myself. If someone else made the card for $30 or $35, I'd buy it and not build it. I think an entire University class could be built around this card. Can you imagine the possibilities of breadboarding a fairly complex design with minimal breadboarding?

But I can just buy the $10 Dev Kit from Cypress!

Of course you can. We did too. That's what got us interested in the part to begin with. Is it a Raspberry Pi Hat or is it a breadboarding tool? If you want to do breadboards, it is just fine. If you want to build something beyond a breadboard that's another story.

Where's the innovation in this project?

That was a real challenge. Took me a couple of weeks of solid Engineering time to figure out just how to program a PSOC from a Raspberry Pi. You see the limitations of the Pi are the unpredictable timing. The Pi doesn't make a great bit-banging programmer. If someone else had already figured out how to program the part, I would have just used their code. Nobody did, though. Took pouring through the Application notes and the answer was there. But not easy to figure out. And what did we do with the answer? We put it up on our github site for all to see. Some clever stuff there? Surely someone else will come along and say that they would have done it better/differently. But they didn't do it. We did.

Doug at Land Boards, LLC (just a guy and his sons who do stuff together).

(commenting on the pricing alone)

I think it's fair for Dough to ask a price that makes the operation viable. We shouldn't have to work for virtually nothing per hour.

The ones that can make kits, shield, hats, boosterpacks, capes, wings for $10 typically have marketing budget poured into the mix to make the prices that low.

Cypress DevKit , Gecko board, LaunchPad, ST Nucleo: can you build them for that price? Why then ask someone else without a marketing machine to do that?

A person that uses his brains and hands deserves a return.

For what it's worth. ..

Related read:

from EEVBlog: The Economics of Selling a Hardware Project.

It describes what's needed to build a viable business and how not to end with empty - or below empty - pockets (with calculations, rates and traps for young players).

Interesting article.

Oviously didn't work so well for Dave as the link to his uCurrent device came back with the "Shop Unavailable" message.

I know I look at this one sometimes.

Typically you’ll try and make sure this figure is just above the one-off parts cost of someone making it themselves (customers will do the math!). So most would rather buy it from you assembled and tested instead of dicking around making it themselves.

I did like this one

Essentially, you price the product “at what people are willing to pay”. If your widget only costs $10 to manufacture, and you know they will pay $100 for it, then great, your gross margin (essentially your profit) is huge.

Followed by this observation

In the OSHW industry, where your customers are cluey, you can’t get away with huge markups.

Cheers for that link.

Mark

Can you point me to an example of two of the above where you did what you explained?

Dave uses the 2.5 multiplier which is a good rule of thumb. Most companies I have worked for have used a 3x multiplier.

Another question, how much per hour do you figure your own time is worth?

These things start out as a hobby project, where time is "a hassle to keep track of" so those are essentially free and cannot be accounted for afterwards.

When things take off, and you quit the day job, those hours need to be accounted for eventually. (but depending on your financial situation, you might accept them being "almost not paid" as a loss-leader for future sales...)

I will answer to your previous question later that I should find a series of links. About this, it depends on the job. Between 35 and 55 Euros per hour.

It's a family owned business, not a hobby project.

Anyway IMHO the business approach is not 100% correct.

Jan this link is very useful and depict a scenario that seems the next step what I have depicted in my previous post. It includes a lot of good suggestions and involve retailers and resellers, the step after the first preproduction (that also gives trustability to the product and a good reference base to the potential distributors / resellers and why not, the industrial scale production investors).

Thank you for sharing this.

Enrico.

Jan this link is very useful and depict a scenario that seems the next step what I have depicted in my previous post. It includes a lot of good suggestions and involve retailers and resellers, the step after the first preproduction (that also gives trustability to the product and a good reference base to the potential distributors / resellers and why not, the industrial scale production investors).

Thank you for sharing this.

Enrico.

That EEVBlog article is actually a follow up on Nathan Seidle's “The Pit of Despair”.

I'm reluctant to post links of an article hosted by one distributor (SparkFun) on the formum of another distributor - but in this case I hope that the context makes it relevant and OK.