Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Re: A Humble Request.... - "Open-Hardware"

[Marcus D. Leech]

On 01/09/2011 04:19 PM, Moeller wrote:
> There are still radio amateurs, hobbyists and other people who like to share
> knowledge about creating hardware. See the SSRP (http://oscar.dcarr.org/ssrp/) 
> project.
> You don't have to be a millionaire to finance your electronics hobby.
> Wasn't it just $30 for the USRP FPGA, and some other low-cost chips on the 
> mainboard?
> Why not creating USRP hardware as a community project like GNU?
> Of course the development and revision cycles are much slower than for
> software, but people could share EDA files on a GIT server.
> With open source hardware it would be easier to create variants,
> e.g. a low-cost version with one RX-only channel, attach some extra 
> functionality,...
Sounds like you're volunteering to create such a project.  Let us know 
when you have everything set-up,
  including initial high-level designs, and preliminary parts 
selections.  :-)

But as an occasional small-scale hardware manufacturer myself (both in 
RF electronics and aerospace),
  I can tell you that simply looking at the raw BOM costs doesn't give 
you a good feel for how much it
  actually costs to produce/test/support real-world hardware.  The 
conventional wisdom in most industries is
  that for small-scale stuff, the MSRP should be roughly 10 times (yes, 
TEN) the raw BOM costs, in order for
  you to not go broke in the first couple of years.  For mass-produced 
items, margins can be allowed to slip into
  the "razor thin" zone, once the market provides sufficient demand, 
and manufacturing processes have been
  streamlined and optimized for cost.  But *in no way* is developmental 
SDR hardware in the "mass produced"
  category, and it never will be.

Eschewing commercially-produced hardware purely for reasons of delivered 
price, is likely, I conjecture, to
  lead to disappointment.


--
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org