The cost of the scroll wheel cannot possibly be more than 10€ and the pcb cannot be more than 1€ battery is about 4e and display can be 7-8, chip is 2-3e and passives, connectors etc brlow 5. The manufacturing costs of the thing are likely below 40€, even in small volumes. Assy costs are probably about 20% of the total.

Part of the high cost may be investments in moulds for the casing and r&d cost.

[–] BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I took a bit of a poke last night, there's a couple of ICs in there that could add up a bit I guess, but even being generous I wasn't getting much last 80.

The cases I saw had the look of a 3D print about them. Original goal seems to have been around 10000, so maybe they're amortizing the r&d across 40 units, little bit of profit and then went and sold 400 of them - nice win for them if so!

To make it clear I don't begrudge them their profit especially as they're open sourcing the thing. The concept and high price has got my creative side going for sure, an ESP32-S3 pro dev board looks like it could handle an sd card, screen, MP3 decode and output to an I2S amp all by itself + BT headphones and WiFi track downloading and battery charging. Slowly talking myself into building a portable podcast machine.

[–] ailurux@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Hey, one of the people working on Tangara here. The case we're shipping with will be CNC'd polycarbonate, though the same design also works for home 3d printing.

The price is a lot of little things adding up, and we want to be able to do smaller runs post-campaign and still have it be worth our time. I also wish it could be more affordable, but that's how it be with indie electronics.

Good luck if you do decide to make a little podcast machine! Just be aware that afaik ESP32-S3 can't do bluetooth audio (see: https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/issues/8675).

[–] BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 2 points 9 months ago

Thanks, really appreciate the feedback! Really good luck with the project, love seeing these kind of devices making it into the wild. Yeah totally appreciate the nature of indie electronics/manufacturing in general and your work totally makes it easier and more approachable for a lone wolf like myself to churn out something functional!

Thanks for heads up on the BT audio, my little investigation the other night lead me to the datasheet for the ESP32-S3, the list of peripheral options is amazing, I'm sure I'll figure something out!

Thanks again and good luck with the project!