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Comment by pjc50

3 hours ago

People are willing to spend quite a lot on regular old mechanical keyboards.

But yes, just eyeballing that it's going to be hard to get it below $5/key and probably more like $10 for the first run.

3 comments

pjc50

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pipe01  2 hours ago

The key's circuit by itself is probably a few tens of cents, I can't imagine the rest of it being that expensive

  • pjc50  1 hour ago

    OP confirms $6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50239398

    For reference, my heuristic for circuit price estimation is

        - passives and little SMT things are free
    - anything electromechanical ~$1: switches, connectors, in this case the pogo pins
    - fancy connectors up to $10 (ZIF sockets, RAM sockets, etc)
    - normal ICs $1
    - BGA or fancier ICs: check digikey or guess $10-$100
    - board area is "free" for small boards (up to hand-sized)

    • podocarp  32 minutes ago

      Is that for a certain order size? Because a lot of the cost can come simply from retooling or swapping components. Like if you have 100 x1 smt components vs 1x 100 smt components it's a huge different if you get what I mean. Also anything through hole I basically just give up getting assembled as a hobbyist.