Isaac Marino Bavaresco wrote:
> It appears that Atmel thinks the same, I bought an AVR Dragon for
> $50.00
> and it is comprised of just the bare board. Atmel is a large company
> and
> they surely can afford the cost of a custom mold.

This sounds more like the issue of case versus no case.  I don't know what a
AVR dragon is, but most likely they think it's something a engineer will be
using on his desk for testing or development, and that the end user is price
sensitive.

A case costs money, not only to build into the product incrementally, but
also the design, tooling, setup charges, etc.  One way or another, the
customer is going to pay for all this.

I don't think its a big/little company issue about the mold.  It's just
math.  Designing and making a mold is expensive.  The advantage is you get
exactly what you want and the eventual incremental cost per unit is low.
Unless you forsee high volumes it doesn't make sense economically, whether
you are a big company or a small one.

Let's be very generous and say that it would have taken only $50K to design
a custom case, get the mold made, get samples, approve them, design the
custom graphics, have Xiaofan approve the look, etc.  If that eventually
saved $8 per unit, then I'd have to sell over 6000 USBProg2 before that
became cheaper than getting a modified off the shelf box.  This math works
the same for a big company.

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