Vitaliy wrote:
> Wow. Definitely puts things in perspective. :)

Plenty of products have way higher volumes than that, and they're not all
cheap disposable consumer items either.  Take a look at the number of PC
motherboards sold per year, or the numbers for a popular car model.

> Is this a consumer item? What's
> the approximate price per unit?

These are commercial items that are used for a month or less then discarded.
I think the customer price is in the $5 to $10 range.  Obviously even $.05
per unit production cost can make a meaningful difference.  It should be no
surprise, but there is far more engineering in the production of these
things than in their design.  I alone spent more time on the production
tester electronics and firmware than on the units themselves, and there is
another engineer that only works on production matters and hasn't done any
design of these units.

By the way, those testers are at the other end of the spectrum.  So far I
think only 4 testers boards have been produced, although there will probably
be a few 10s made over the life of this product.  For a project I'm working
on today we created just 3 copies of a particular design the customer
wanted.  These are essentially USB interfaces for live data gathering from
another gizmo for testing, debugging, and research.  In that case we built
them by hand by adding a few parts to our ReadyBoard-02
(http://www.embedinc.com/products/ready02).


********************************************************************
Embed Inc, Littleton Massachusetts, http://www.embedinc.com/products
(978) 742-9014.  Gold level PIC consultants since 2000.
-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist