Posted by chipweinberger 2 days ago
USB-C connectors from well-known brands start at less than $0.20, USB-B ones are $0.30. Same story for the low-end: C can be found for as little as $0.011, B starts at $0.05. Resistors are basically free - about a cent a piece if you splurge, more like $0.0007 if you really push it.
With the EU practically mandating USB-C on all portable electronics, the market is rapidly shifting towards it being the default for all 5V-powered gear: either you ship a cable/brick with it, or you give it USB-C. Even with a premium connector it is quite obvious which option is cheaper, so even bargain-bin gear is incentivized to adopt USB-C, which in turn pushes the connector manufacturers to develop dirt-cheap USB-C options.
USB 2.0 is a superset of 1.1 spec and considered inclusive of 1.1 speeds. I said 2.0 speeds specifically because Type C does not even recognize “USB 1.1” as a speed, and when you go to 3.0+ you start to put other constraints on routing and most importantly requirements on the cable (it needs to be emarked if it supports super speed).
The rest of your comment, totally agree. Especially with EU mandating power be USB-C if possible, which this easily could be.
But for providing power over USB-C, you generally need a dedicated IC to handle VBUS switching. It wasn't worth it.
Also, once you ship a consumer product with a USB port on it, you'll realize a lot of people really don't understand how USB works, and USB-C doubly so. Square holes for square pegs goes a long way.
I personally really don't like it in a world where everyone has USB-C power bricks readily available and USB-B cables are dying out, but considering the user base it is not an entirely unreasonable design decision - for now.
Why custom MIDI connectors of all things? What requirement couldn’t be met off the shelf?
That doesn't mean it is completely impossible, though. Fab2 (formerly Atomic Semi, of Jim Keller and Sam Zeloof fame) is trying to do exactly this by aiming at making small-scale production affordable. The trick is to replace the whole mask-based lithography with electron beam scanning: way slower, but no mask costs.
But they are now targeting selling mini-fabs to R&D labs rather than offering an affordable ASIC-as-a-Service. Let's hope one of their customers makes it available to the public!
Hobbyist electronics manufacturing has always been reasonably affordable, with the old perfboard / stripboard from RadioShack having been a staple of the hobby since forever. At-home etching was also available for the people who cared more about having cool PCBs than about having healthy lungs.
The availability of cheap factory-made low-volume PCBs goes hand-in-hand with the switch towards smaller and smaller SMD parts. You don't need a professional PCB for a few THT parts, and you can always put the odd SOT part on a breakout or dead-bug solder it. But when many interesting parts started to become available only in QFN/DFN (or worse: BGA) packages, proper PCBs became the only option. Combine that with PCB factories wanting to make a few extra bucks off of their wasted board space, and it is suddenly quite attractive to hack together a quick-and-dirty ordering page for hobbyists and prototypes. No new technology needed, just a new market waiting to be served.
$4 / die custom chips are indeed very attractive, but the $4000 MOQ is not. A high-school or college student just getting into electronics can afford spending $100 on a hobby project just to discover it is broken, but there is no way they can afford spending "used car" money on it. That's startup territory, or "retired Bay Area engineer" territory.
Unfortunately they still run into the same basic economic problems: a wafer might be only $1000, but a set of masks is closer to $100k. This means you want to maximize the number of wafers, with ideally each wafer only containing a single copy of each chip. But even if you assume they just fill a reticle to the absolute maximum with unique chips (let's call it 40 unique designs) and fit, say, only 25 copies on a wafer, that's still only 40 wafers, so $2500/wafer in one-off costs - completely dwarfing the actual wafer itself.
For hobbyists you want a process closer to $10k / wafer with zero mask costs. Fit the same 1000 chips on there as before, and you can now sell people 5 copies of their chip for $50. That's a completely different game!
It’s actually not hard to hack this together as a .net application and run it on a laptop, but I suspect your target market has a bit of money to spend.
Learning piano is already largely an upper middle class active and after that what’s another 200$ or 300$.
A higher end digital piano is easily over 2k.
Making sure your target market has money is the key take away.
Not sure if this is in scope, but I’d love an easy way for the community to share midi files. I can somewhat do very basic piano progressions, but I still can’t play well.
I’d be grateful if someone would share midi files for me to plugin to my music software. Of course I’d provide full credit
What is this strategy? You're building this in China, it's already over.
These niche hobby products are usually reasonably safe because they rely on community network effects, becoming the darling of a random subreddit or discord group and people aren't going to save $20 to get some device of dubious origin.
>Assembly is just a single screw, for a single PCB. The injection mold has generous draft, no slides.
Says everything