On 12/6/06, Wouter van Ooijen wrote: > > 2. Now add up every single hour you've ever spent on the hardware > > design, software design, documentation for the end user and > > production, answering production questions, technical support (both > > online/forums and direct emails/calls from customers). > > Yes, there is quite some cost in that. But I sell other things beside > the Wisp628, so a good reputation is worth some time spent. > > As I said in another reply: the Wisp628 design is old, based on the yet > older WISP, which I made when it was all 'only' a hobby. So maybe the > equation would be different if I had to do a totally new design now. I think Rob Hamerling (author of xwisp2, http://www.robh.nl/picsoft.php) contributes a lot to the software for Wisp628. Since Microchip has so many PICs and so many programming specifications, I think software development is kind of the difficult point for hobbyist programmer. Therefore it might make more business sense to sell clone programmers. There are plenty of PS+ and ICD2 clones. I think we will start to see PICkit 2 clones as well. In fact there are already some kits sold in various Chinese forums. The low price of the original PICkit 2 might make the profit margin a bit low for people in the developed world... Regards, Xiaofan -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist