Thank you Doug,

I don't think 3000 units is an achievable amount for a small company to turnover

This is the detail I am not aware. Frankly I was prepending to thing that 100.000$ was the minimal investment for a company gong on the market marketing a custom device... So, considered your assertion, they are orienting this service just to the very big companies.

Good ideas the customisation options you suggest, obviously

Enrico,

I have no experience as a salesperson or involved in distribution from a company on any scale.

I am primarily a hobbyist user of this type of device (although my profession is semi-related to computing and micro-controllers).

I think it would depend on exactly what the company is trying to do and how much of their service is supply and fit Verses how much is maintain and service.

Several Kickstarter business models manage to achieve in excess of 3000 units, the nature of global access to new products. Other ideas fall far short of this goal.

Unfortunately without an idea of the costs & timescales involved with having your Pi design modified by the Element 14 team it would be hard to design a kickstarter around this plan.

Many of the Pi based Kickstarters I have seen have had between 100 and 1000 backers, far short of the quantities needed to meet the minimum requirements for this program.

On another note...

If suppliers do build customised versions for general resale, this could make supporting the platform more difficult.

With the limited number of versions out in the wild at present, it is much easier to make an assessment as to the devices capabilities and feature sets.

For example, if a tutorial is written for the (hypothetical) 12V GPIO tolerant Raspberry Pi, another user may find their standard Pi emitting the magic blue smoke.

Or:

P1: Why is my bluetooth not working? [Blurry Photo Attached]

P2: Because you don't have a Bluetooth dongle attached

P1: It's on-board

P2: Oh!, What bluetooth chipset is it

P1: I don't know...

etc... etc...

You are right Doug,

making two counts I have just supposed that the customisation costs was part of the final product but probably it is not. So, maybe that the 3000 pieces is just a number but by a marketing point of view it is far from the break even point to grant a decent return per unit sold. I am not a marketing man at all nor salseparson too, but I was just thinking on how much sense can have this premises... There is a lack of information to make a complete and trustable scenario.

Enrico

Paul, I suppose hopefully that if a company makes this kind of investment (that is anyway high) to resale its own branded and customised PI, they should include the internal costs to adapt the standard official documentation to the specific characteristics of their new product. Another lack of information missed is if there are and what are if any the limits for the customisation of the board. I think that as a company makes its own it's up to the company to give assistance and support and this is a PI-derivate model not supported by the technical PI crew.

Enrico

Enrico Miglino wrote:

 

I think that as a company makes its own it's up to the company to give assistance and support and this is a PI-derivate model not supported by the technical PI crew.

I agree, but I was thinking more along the lines of 3rd-party support, such as Element14 community members.

Ahhh ... This is true, so we should expect a rain of PI-aliens soon from hundreds of companies around the World asking to help their users to use their stuff

Yep!

I'm also interested to find out wether and how customised hardware would be supported in the official Raspberry Pi OS releases.

I would suspect that the "configure your pi" means that you get to leave out components. I don't think there will be re-layouting of the PCB. I don't think the "pi with bluetooth onboard" will happen under this programme.

Update: Hmmm. They do say "add stuff".... Still not sure if it will happen.