IMHO I can't imagine a technology that is closer to production that the Arduino, it gets you 90% and more importantly instills the limits of the technology before it goes to a electronic prototype house.
Prototypes are easy. Production is hard. This is the current issue with the Tesla Model 3, a few is easy, a full production line with all it's perils that's a massively harder proposition.
Many years ago we worked on releasing an Arduino compatible design.
To do so we had to:
1) Release the board files - fine.
2) Open source the code - ok.
3) Pay the foundation 20% of our retail profit - ~record scratch~ - not going to happen.
There is not enough margin in retail to justify asking for a $40 license per chip for a $5 hardware part. The Arduino compatible initiative was dropped and we built on bare metal instead.
Other Maker boards have some leverage here (Raspberry Pi, Next Thing Co, Electric Imp) because they have control of an exclusive chip supply. Arduino being a clone of the Wiring SDK + an off the shelf chip on a break out board never got to exercise their position effectively in the enterprise / mass market consumer electronics space.
Analogously the Apple ][ started as a development platform for hobbyists that became the business workhorse with VisiCalc. Arduino never left the hobbyist space and scared off a lot of legitimately interested businesses with the ambiguous licensing terms and Genuino debacle.
The previous poster's point is that if you can cram your problem into the limited resources of an Arduino, with its small ATMega CPU and very limited memory, it's not a big jump to a custom board for your low-cost product. Anyone can buy an ATMEGA328 CPU,
the low-end Arduino processor. $1.78 from DigiKey; $1.27 at Seeed. No royalties.
IMHO I can't imagine a technology that is closer to production that the Arduino, it gets you 90% and more importantly instills the limits of the technology before it goes to a electronic prototype house.
Prototypes are easy. Production is hard. This is the current issue with the Tesla Model 3, a few is easy, a full production line with all it's perils that's a massively harder proposition.
and there is always the Pit of Despair: https://www.sparkfun.com/news/909