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. ..

(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. ..

I agree it is good to ask a fair price, but I still feel this is relying on backers not realizing they can get near-equivalent functionality (actually a higher performance part) for 1/5th of the cost.

The value-add appears to be HAT form-factor, is that worth the additional $45 is what feels uncomfortable.

Hobbyists benefit from the ultra-low cost dev-boards that Cypress have made available. I'm sure Cypress have no issue losing a bit of money on 54 backers purchasing their dev-boards.

I feel uncomfortable ripping off fellow hobbyists.

I get that everyone has different perception of value so of course this is just a personal opinion.

In good spirit:

>  I'm sure Cypress have no issue losing a bit of money on 54 backers purchasing their dev-boards.

They'd be happy. I think their goal is to sell PSoCs, not to sell devboards (those, I believe, are marketing material, not a commercial product).

> I feel uncomfortable ripping off fellow hobbyists.

There I beg to differ. I think the asking price is in line with what the components + pcb + mail charge cost, and a little for the time spent designing and building the boards at home.

I guess if we would calculate what's left in Dough's hand per hour worked - if we divide his gain by the time spent designing, softwareing, ordering parts, soldering, testing, packing and mailing,

it's close to $0.0 / hour.

Whether this is a hat worth purchasing, that's a different discussion. I'd say no on that. That doesn't make it a rip-off though.

The subtle difference doesn't seem any more different than the artificially created jobs in some countries, such as the button-push guy in lifts.

They work hard, but is the end result actually needed?

If people knew there was a lower priced alternative, would they still buy this board?

While the actual cost charged might be in line with the work effort, it is the unfair advantage through people not having done their research to know they can get near-equivalent functionality for far less, that makes it a rip-off - just my opinion.

Doug himself has stated he could reduce the price and attract 2-3 times as many backers. But it looks like he may prefer to sit on the price curve where he will still pick up enough backers (fellow hobbyists) but not have to try too hard to reduce COG and manufacturing costs. I don't see why that should be rewarded.

Again, just a personal opinion.

I could reduce costs by doing the manufacturing overseas. That would drop the shipping costs dramatically as well. Not my thing.

Why not, if I may ask?

Do you actually put the SMT PSOC in yourself or do that with the PCB?

Clem

Yes, we bought a nice optical microscope to assemble fine pitch parts and we hand solder them. Two of my sons assemble cards. They are both J-STD-01 certified for soldering. We test all of our cards as well. Having that sort of equipment is part of the cost of being in this business even in a small way.

There are a bunch of factors.

1 - Chicken and egg. You need volume to get offshore assembly and you need offshore assembly to get the prices that get volume.

2 - We don't trust anyone to assemble quality boards. We don't have any returns so far with more than 1000 boards shipped. We like that. Compare that to stuff we get from China with high failure rates.

3 - We like to do a Kickstarter every six weeks or so. But we also like to take off around finals so the kids can do well in school. We do have day jobs/school.

4 - We like to fulfill quickly. Seems like everybody that did high volumes took 6 months to fulfill. We've funded in the middle of the month and shipped all the first month's rewards that month. Realize it takes 2 weeks to get your funds so you have to buy boards and material a month earlier. That's why we have a "smallish" early bird reward the first month.

That's just a handful of the reasons.

Frankly if the RPPSOC was $20 (which is less than the parts and labor) we'd still have people complaining that we are ripping them off since the dev kit is $10. And we'd get nowhere near the volume to get China interested. This is just too narrow a market.

In my opinion - at least this is the approach I follow - when you startup (not to consider in the common meaning) a project you should consider the work cost, including the prototype creation, design time, experiments and so on, just only as cost of investment. If you produce only 50 pieces or less (I usually start with 10) also by a marketing point of view you can't charge on these first small bunch of units your personal work costs. It is your risk, not a cost. Ignore this then make the right price and add a small percentage of your job/ investment cost.

How to calculate the percentage? This can be done before and it is very useful for the future of your product. You evaluate the real effort needed, establish a correct market price and then based on the competitor market price of similar products evaluate the max amount you can charge. For example:

• Hardware components: 10$
• PCB (real price for 10 pieces, this cost will decrease in future with larger productions) : 5$
• Wires and accessory cables : 1$
• Case or support or just the screw parts; 3$

The total cost will be 16$

You can sell it at 25$ covering also the hidden costs (you will discover them going ahead in the project) and cover part of the job costs.

Calculate the hardware costs based on a single unit buying only a set of components (also buying 10 you will pay with a small discount)

Make reviews, presentations, how-to and distribute them on sites like Element14, Hackaday.io, instructables.com etc.

Write articles and tutorials, create interest on the product that will be attractive as it is cheaper for any potential customer / user than creating one by himself.

See what happens.

If you sell 1 or 2, you have a small quantity  of products in your storage for the future. If you sell all 10 you have a base to start a bit larger production.

Take in account two important factors after this considerations:

1. create a shop online (also Kickstarter if you are so aficionado and maybe also on indiegogo.com) before you start the promotion of the project and everywhere - in a very discrete way, don't worry that interested users/customers search for the link - the shop link. I suggest drobott.com and tindie.com but these are just two options.
2. with the costs in mind, you can reasonably calculate the break even point as follow:

Suppose that your job cost will be 500$ (but the real cost is up to you). So:

• Cost of the product: 16$
• Acceptable (respect competitors, possibly excluding China) job cost: 4$

Total production cost: 20$

At this point (this is just a suggestion) stay as low as possible with earning margin: it is better earning 1$ from 1000 customers than 10$ from one. The information and product visibility  (or self-marketing) moves faster with many users... Multiply the cost for 1.5 (max, better if less).

selling cost: 30$

500$ / 4$ = 125 units you should sell at this price.

So, IMHO 125 pieces is not an impossible target worldwide. At least to start. Or to kickstart.

(It is the worth to lower the price to 25$ and try to sell 200 units).

Just an example, I say, that I hope can explain what I mean.

Enrico

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).