> For something of a smartphone class, a one-off PCB may cost several hundred dollars. Then the parts will cost another several hundred dollars in small quantities, as well as being difficult to obtain.
> Now, you have to solder the parts onto the board, which is a decidedly nontrivial thing - and if you decide you want someone else to do this, it's probably another several hundred dollars.
I'd love to live in a developed country where these statements are true. For a "smartphone class" board with 6-10 layers, 0201 size passives (1.0 x 0.5 mm), and 0.4-0.5 mm pitch BGAs (almost all mid to high end ARM microprocessors) you're talking about thousands of dollars of setup costs for each step of the process before you even make a single board. Reducing these costs to the hundreds of dollars requires a whole different world of expertise dealing with Chinese suppliers and manufacturers.
To give some perspective on how expensive it is for an EE working in California on non-trivial projects (more like RPi and less like Arduino): 10 boards with an ARM microprocessor, some DDR2/3 RAM, a multimedia processor, and a gigabit PHY on an 8 layer board can easily cost on the order of $5,000-7,000 with a month+ turn around time in the Bay Area. If I want the same design made in a week by reputable suppliers (such that I'm 90% sure that the issues I debug aren't from fabrication or assembly errors for a first run of a design), it can cost me closer to $15,000. The difference between making 10 boards and a one off? Usually less than $500, or 10% of the cost of the best case. That's usually not including the cost of parts which, unless you're contracting or working for a big company, you'd be lucky to get without a friend who can wander around the Shenzhen electronics part markets and overnight stuff to you.
The problems just go on and on. Many of the useful parts like cameras, multimedia processors, microprocessors, and high end ethernet MACs/PHY often require signed NDAs before you can even get the documentation. Oh and if you want to work with anything considered high speed digital electronics (i.e. bus speeds of 133/266mhz for DDR1/2 RAM, 1GHZ for MIPI2 cameras), you're now in the realm of RF (analog) electronics and intermittent bugs that can drive even the most talented and well equipped debugger insane.
Reality is messy and this is just one of those cases where the decks are stacked heavily against open hardware that is more complex than an Arduino. It's telling that many of the open source projects like PandaBoard, BeagleBoard, or OpenRD were originally made as reference designs by companies like Texas Instruments and Marvell or as otherwise well funded initiatives like the RaspberryPi.
I've run into the same wall with my own projects. The differential in cost between a one-off ARM board of medium complexity compared to even a higher-complexity dev tool made in decent quantity (gumstix, rpi, beagleboard) is just amazing.
What I've noticed is that there is a step in cost once you hit a certain level of complexity. Markup on parts is pretty predictable across the board, but the fabrication costs jump once you exceed the capabilities of the hobbyist-friendly services. OSH Park will do 5 mil trace, 4 mil space, 10 mil annular ring, which is about the best there is when it comes to inexpensive one-offs. That's enough to break out some of a 0.8mm BGA. To improve your capabilities with components that size or smaller, you need to look elsewhere, and suddenly you're looking at "real" services and now the prices are in the several (or tens-of) thousands of dollars range. That's the point where a hobbyist can no longer approach this stuff. Now you're investing in prototyping and you've got to have a business plan.
At least you can get a System-on-Module. That seems to be the only way forward unless you have lots of money to sink up front.
> Now, you have to solder the parts onto the board, which is a decidedly nontrivial thing - and if you decide you want someone else to do this, it's probably another several hundred dollars.
I'd love to live in a developed country where these statements are true. For a "smartphone class" board with 6-10 layers, 0201 size passives (1.0 x 0.5 mm), and 0.4-0.5 mm pitch BGAs (almost all mid to high end ARM microprocessors) you're talking about thousands of dollars of setup costs for each step of the process before you even make a single board. Reducing these costs to the hundreds of dollars requires a whole different world of expertise dealing with Chinese suppliers and manufacturers.
To give some perspective on how expensive it is for an EE working in California on non-trivial projects (more like RPi and less like Arduino): 10 boards with an ARM microprocessor, some DDR2/3 RAM, a multimedia processor, and a gigabit PHY on an 8 layer board can easily cost on the order of $5,000-7,000 with a month+ turn around time in the Bay Area. If I want the same design made in a week by reputable suppliers (such that I'm 90% sure that the issues I debug aren't from fabrication or assembly errors for a first run of a design), it can cost me closer to $15,000. The difference between making 10 boards and a one off? Usually less than $500, or 10% of the cost of the best case. That's usually not including the cost of parts which, unless you're contracting or working for a big company, you'd be lucky to get without a friend who can wander around the Shenzhen electronics part markets and overnight stuff to you.
The problems just go on and on. Many of the useful parts like cameras, multimedia processors, microprocessors, and high end ethernet MACs/PHY often require signed NDAs before you can even get the documentation. Oh and if you want to work with anything considered high speed digital electronics (i.e. bus speeds of 133/266mhz for DDR1/2 RAM, 1GHZ for MIPI2 cameras), you're now in the realm of RF (analog) electronics and intermittent bugs that can drive even the most talented and well equipped debugger insane.
Reality is messy and this is just one of those cases where the decks are stacked heavily against open hardware that is more complex than an Arduino. It's telling that many of the open source projects like PandaBoard, BeagleBoard, or OpenRD were originally made as reference designs by companies like Texas Instruments and Marvell or as otherwise well funded initiatives like the RaspberryPi.