Hi there!
Thanks again for your feedback!
That advise from Blueskull should be considered mandatory, not optional.
Message received, working on that
but price is a little steep
tl;dr: believe us, we made our best to cut the price down without risking of being unable to fulfill the rewards !
Long answer:
There are many factors that forced us to make such price (let's talk about the first pledge, i.e. 20€).
- Part of the shipping fees is included (some countries have no additional shipping fees). Shipping is expensive! You get a much better deal by ordering more than one uChip.
- The goal corresponds to a very limited number of uChip. This is about 1k units. This might seem a very huge number, but actually it is not!
- We must order some % more, to account for lost packets (even if shipping has tracking number...) and defective units.
- Kickstarter fees.
- Variabilty. Just to give you two examples: 1) we are in Italy, so Kickstarter only allow us to run a campaign in EUR. But manufacturers and shippers are paid in USD! EU elections are on the way: we must not forget the effect of Brexit Referendum on the USD/POUND exchange rate... 2) if suddenly a component become out of stock, and there is one much more expensive 100% compatible, we cannot tell the backer to wait 20 weeks more, so we will try to upgrade that component.
Still, the cost for a single piece is the same of an Arduino Uno.
especially if you want to avoid people just sending the design off to a PCB fab and then making these themselves rather than buying from you.
tl;dr: making few uChip boards will cost you much more than the first pledge!
Long answer:
From our personal experience with uChip, a single individual would not save money from making his uChip at home. The cost of the components for a single unit already exceeds the price of a uChip of the first pledge. The PCB also is quite expensive (4-layer board), even if you consider the cheapest China pcb manufacturer on PCBShopper.com. Not to mention PCB assembly: if you don't want to pay a fortune, you must do it at home. Then you need the stencil to perform reflow soldering. And pick and placing all the 0402, UDFN and CSP devices is a really long hard nightmare! At the end, even if you make 10 units (to amortize PCB+stencil cost and to get a better price break on components), you won't get cheaper than ten times a single pledge (i.e. 200€)! And the 10x pledge is even cheaper!
Still, uChip will be opensource. We think instead that the single individual might want to make his improved version of uChip (and why not, sell it!).
I would expect Shenzhen cloners to be on it really quick
Yes, that's fine. uChip will be open source, and anyone can make it, and even sell it!
We also believe that Arduino has become so popular thanks to clone manufacturers too. They made it affordable for everyone. Still some people are buying original Arduino boards, which are much more expensive.
It would be our delight if uChip became as popular as Arduino. And if this happens because of clones, well, we thank them!
Cheers!