Comment by Romario77

7 days ago

clone relies on hardware being designed and software written - this takes a lot of money, so you can't just count the final price of parts as the price.

Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.

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Romario77

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pclmulqdq  7 days ago

A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Give it a week to include debugging. Amortize that cost over a million units and engineering time comes out to less than one cent per board.

  • RealityVoid  7 days ago

    > A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work.

    Hah! I like to underestimate scope as well, but this is really something else. Definitely a competent engineer could make something like this. But a couple of months maybe. You won't even read the documentation for the chip in a day.

    • pclmulqdq  7 days ago

      Have you seen the schematics for these boards? They are exceptionally simple. Many devkits are much more complicated.

      I have actually done embedded engineering in the past and I was being generous with "a day." Skimming a datasheet is a skill and it certainly will not take a day to get the information you need off of it.

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  • 1718627440  13 hours ago

    I have been modifying Arduino libraries for weeks, there is much more work in them than just a single day. Granted replacing the Arduino IDE with Autoconf took 3 days. (2 and a half of which were spend on analyzing what the IDE does.)

  • shadowpho  7 days ago

    It’s not quite that easy, and besides the hard part is the SW. arduino spent years writing SW code and still does to make it easy to run, debug issues and provide support.

    Also a million dev kits is unrealistic for vast majority of companies 5-20k is more the number I hard.

    • drzaiusx11  6 days ago

      To be frank, the Arduino ide was a fork of Processing's and the compiler suite was GCC. They 'simply' glued the pre-existing pieces together. I'm not saying that it's trivial to do that but it's also not exactly a herculean task. Even the bootloader was a fork of Hernando Barragán's pre-existing Wiring project.

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