How come this board is so cheap?

[Alphatronique]

Hi

think that spark fun do it production in house

it just buy a near 200K $ MyData pick place  machine ...  so must use it  O0

but PCB and part come probably from asian ..
it already post something like buy batch from asian of fake AVRr chip ..

[DakLak]

I buy robotics supplies, in person, in ShangHai and ShenZhen, Guangdong Province and the economies realised are through technology and techniques.

Many of the named US companies have their products made in China - often on the same production line! Whether you are vacuum cleaner company selling overpriced robots to the US military or a robot supply shop, they all come from the same places.

Dagu, now selling direct in the USA, is a typical OEM (white label) manufacturer. They make for at least four well known US companies.

As for making things 'cheap' the few pennies, Yuan, cents saved are not worth the effort - the major savings in PCBs is the base material. Buying IC's in the hundreds of thousands is also a good way to get ICs labelled the way you want - even blank - or with the pinout configurations changed.

Even though I am based in VietNam, a sizeable part of my company's income is derived from supplying elevator control boards for elevators (lifts) whose manufacturers has ceased business. All my replacement boards are 'copied' from originals in China.

X-ray machines reveal IC die shapes and the hidden secrets of multilayer boards. Have a PIC with a locked up program in it? No problem - a few wafts of sulphuric or nitric acid fumes will reveal an IC's die and some delicate work under a high-end Japanese microscope will allow the e-fuse protection to be removed and the protection reversed so the program can be read and duplicated.

So you can buy with confidence - the savings, as others have implied, are realised as the Chinese are following the maxim: Fortunes can be made from profits thinner than paper.

[dannyf]

So you can buy with confidence...

Well said.

However, you have to respect people's right to be ignorant. So let the crazy think crazy.

[SArepairman]

i am surprised that a PIC can perform a sophisticated enough function to merit such effort, but then again you make it sound that with the right equipment the job can be done in hours, I guess its a small price to pay for battle tested code that you can be assured will work.

How much does a high end japanese microscope cost?
and do you have a list of easily compromised microcontrollers?

What happens if you run into a more obscure micro controller that does not have a known disarming procedure? Is it really cheaper to pay a specialist to determine how to deactivate the protection then to rewrite black box code? Or is it really that trivial?

[Alphatronique]

Hi

check that tread   https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/protection-in-mcu/

Chipwork have alredy publish Die map and image of Xbox-one and Last playsation ...

Russian or China may read you almost any MCU for under 2000$ now ...

as i tell to my customer now try to hack prof a design was totally futile ...

but DakLak i knot about volume but many of that ebay stuff was quite low volume
i remember have see induction welder board that sell for far less that BOM cost
that still amazed me ..

[calexanian]

Most likely knockoff parts and somebody is just trying to push them out the door. Just get rid of them kinda thing. It helps that china subsidized that junk. 

[DakLak]

@SArepairman:
Velleman make kits and utility boards. It is cheap enough to strip their chips for duplicating.

When I do PCB tear-downs I use a local hospital medical technician (and he uses the hospital X-ray) for track location on multilevel boards and IC die outlines. He uses both power and a focussing technique to probe the different levels.

My employer also makes military/commercial robots and recently we have seen damaged/abandoned US robots from Afghanistan on sale - including the iRobot - and all the software and strip-downs can be bought for a couple of hundred dollars a set. We are also into IR IFF systems.

If you are interested in MESH radio, Afghanis collect them from the war fields and sell them for a few dollars. The US scatters 'rocks' around which are actually sensor units that detect various things.

These days assume nothing but nothing is 'corporate confidentiall'. That's in addition to GCHQ and NSA!

E-fuses are easy to locate - there is usually a metallic screen protecting them. This has to be carefully removed and then all the e-fuses are exposed and can be reset. After that it is simply a matter of copying the software. ALL e-fuses can be exposed and neutralised.

I don't know the cost of these microscopes - lets say they are not that expensive given the workshops they are housed in. The area where nitric or sulphuric acid fumes are used is far better protected!

@Alphatronique:
IMO, the C in China does not stand for Cheap - many high quality products come out of China as we all know. But if you want 'poor quality' they can do that, too.

Even though I visit these Chinese workshops/manufacturing plants I cannot see how some of their prices are so low. Our PCBs were routinely subjected to adhesion tests where a weight was hung soldered to tracks and I never saw one fail.

I have bought laser cutters and water abrasive cutters from China and they are all solid stuff - our water cutter runs 365/7/24 (except for Tet) - yet it withstands all the heavy workload.

Some e-Bay stuff is made on spec. A few tens or hundreds are made and when they get responses then they crank up production.

Samsung Note 3 cell handsets are being made in VietNam and the quality is there. I have thousands of PCBs made here in VN and the prices are low yet the base material good (sourced from China).

How can an electronic calliper, with LCD readout AND a digital interface, be retailed for USD$15? They are substantially mechanical.

The average run is measured in 500 or 1000 pieces, then they stop and see if any upgrades are needed then on to the next run.

[pickle9000]

If the govt in Canada would subsidize shipping I could imagine companies coming from everywhere to set up shop. But of course that is just one small aspect of this whole thing. Maybe we can blame Walmart.

[Lurch]

One thing to remember is China produces lots of expensive stuff as well as cheap stuff, but because they produce pretty much everything (exaggeration) in the world then the quantities of Chinese produced kit (expensive or cheap) is going to be large.

[BravoV]

If you are interested in MESH radio, Afghanis collect them from the war fields and sell them for a few dollars. The US scatters 'rocks' around which are actually sensor units that detect various things.

I guess its just the matter of time one of these will ended up here in this forum as a tear down thread. 

[jmaja]

Go check the price of an LM2596 at your favorite vendor, then try to figure out how this sells for $1.73 with "free shipping".

Octopart shows $0.70 for the ON Semiconductor version of that. Probably it is much cheaper in large volumes.
http://octopart.com/partsearch#!?q=%20LM2596

The shipping part of the equation is harder to understand.

[aargee]

Doesn't the Chinese government subsidise postage to the west (quite heavily)?

[BravoV]

Doesn't the Chinese government subsidise postage to the west (quite heavily)?

Even it doesn't, it should be safe to assume cost of maintaining the whole China national post (infrastructures + wages etc) should be cheaper than the west right ?

[digsys]

  Doesn't the Chinese government subsidise postage to the west (quite heavily)? 

Yes they do. I've had a few occasions where I got major differences in quotes form China and USA/Europe/etc for a same item -
and this is NOT just the old trick of making a product cheaper and hiding the cost/profit in shipping. I've had differences of
$500 <> $25 (a 3D microscope). As well as - when I've ASKED why the shipping was cheap and they had no problem answering.

[EEVblog]

Quote:

Note: A portion of this sale is given back to Arduino LLC to help fund continued development of new tools and new IDE features.

[zapta]

Quote:

Note: A portion of this sale is given back to Arduino LLC to help fund continued development of new tools and new IDE features.

Do you believe that the unspecified portion is a significant contribution to the X3 price?

[DakLak]

@BravoV:
International Postal Rates are set by the International Postal Union. It is also the mechanism whereby postal settlements between countries are effected.

I have found that Chinese suppliers often use carriers other than the usual suspects - UPS, Fedex, etc. - who access the discount wholesale rates offered by the very same big forwarders. Guaranteeing delivery costs, whereas 2-3 day delivery is used to fill up containers.

One carrier, JNA of Singapore, is 50% of UPS/Fedex and delivers in 2 days to North America.

[lapm]

I pretty much build my base sortment of electronics components from these cheap ebay deals.. Ok it takes couple weeks to deliver, but i just cant get better price from local dealers.

Dont know how they do it, but seems good feedback sellers are reliable and selling what they advertise. And im not complaining their prices.. Just at christmas time i used 20 euros to get me some more use full components and modules. Would have cost near 140 euros if bough from local sources... 

I think only things i'm going to buy locally is oscilloscope and some other high price equipment. That way i can complain to someone that's actually speaking my language instead of chinese...

[amyk]

I have heard (but not experienced this magnitude) that it is all about relationships, and if you have a good relationship with a supplier you can get 1 or 1000 pieces of small discretes (like SMD resistors and capacitors) for the same price - it's not much more than the price of the raw material. They become practically free.

[Prime73]

I hear quite often "knockoff parts" and "fake chip" in regards to these cheap deals from China. Question is though: how can one make a fake chip that functions as the "original one"? I would assume it would be an approximately the same effort, same lane, etc. Why bother? Are there any actual examples that show a side by side comparison of a "knockoff part" vs its expensive counterpart - a "genuine part" that prove a degraded performance or something say in the above mentioned ATMEGA?

[dannyf]

how can one make a fake chip that functions as the "original one"?

Great question.

Unfortunately, for some people it is far easier to perpetuate rumors / falsehood than to investigate or to think.

[SArepairman]

Well I also know they sell certain things cheap, like there was a certain DDS module that had an incorrect filter installed on it (a low pass filter at 70 MHz instead of 50 MHz I believe). Rumor had it that cost to rework the board made selling uneconomical, so they just moved the boards to cut their losses.


And I guess the only way to protect MCU code is to put fanatical men with cigarettes and guns around the MCU.

[dannyf]

there was a certain DDS module that had an incorrect filter installed on it (a low pass filter at 70 MHz instead of 50 MHz I believe).

They do have 70Mhz filters on them. Not sure if they are "incorrect" or not.

Rumor had it that cost to rework the board made selling uneconomical, so they just moved the boards to cut their losses.

Correcting those filters means dropping in comparable parts of different values - just a new production run. If the rumor were correct, you would have expected some people producing those modules with the "correct" filters.

And I guess the only way to protect MCU code is to put men with cigarettes and guns around the MCU.

I agree.

[SArepairman]

there was a certain DDS module that had an incorrect filter installed on it (a low pass filter at 70 MHz instead of 50 MHz I believe).

They do have 70Mhz filters on them. Not sure if they are "incorrect" or not.

Rumor had it that cost to rework the board made selling uneconomical, so they just moved the boards to cut their losses.

Correcting those filters means dropping in comparable parts of different values - just a new production run. If the rumor were correct, you would have expected some people producing those modules with the "correct" filters.

And I guess the only way to protect MCU code is to put men with cigarettes and guns around the MCU.

I agree.

I think the story went that they had a HUGE production run. SO I guess MANY boards were sold out of spec, but you can still get proper ones.

[dannyf]

I think the story went that they had a HUGE production run.

I tend to view those stories with a grain of salt.