All spot on, Pedward, and in line with what many of us have been saying. You don't have to compete in the gutter with the "big boys" to make a decent living. Do your own thing, do it well, and treat your customers right.
And who is going to port the Arduino libraries to GCC for the P2? So far nothing but crickets and if Parallax doesn't give it's stamp of approval, it probably won't happen.
The sad thing is, other processors already have a Arduino type development environment and that includes the Pic32, ARM, MSP430, and 16 bit Pics. The only one that doesn't is the Prop for some strange reason.
Another thing is, I don't think Parallax wants this market or to be associated with the P2 from the comments I've read here. The P2 is clearly being aimed at the commercial market so they can get the million plus sales every year to recoup their investment. Because if they don't recoup their investment there won't be a P3.
And who is going to port the Arduino libraries to GCC for the P2? So far nothing but crickets and if Parallax doesn't give it's stamp of approval, it probably won't happen.
Parallax doesn't need to give a stamp of approval. We need a P1 port for Martin's hardware.
Isn't SimpleIDE an Arduino type development environment for the Propeller?
It's simple to install, simple to use. Comes with some Prop specific libs. Is gaining great tutorial/educational material.
I'm sure Parallax want's to pursue commercial applications of the Prop II but I see no evidence that they will be neglecting their hobbyist/educational followers. As say there is a lot of effort going into the IDE and support materials. Perhaps they don't cover the PII yet but I'm sure that will come.
And who is going to port the Arduino libraries to GCC for the P2? So far nothing but crickets and if Parallax doesn't give it's stamp of approval, it probably won't happen.
The sad thing is, other processors already have a Arduino type development environment and that includes the Pic32, ARM, MSP430, and 16 bit Pics. The only one that doesn't is the Prop for some strange reason.
Another thing is, I don't think Parallax wants this market or to be associated with the P2 from the comments I've read here. The P2 is clearly being aimed at the commercial market so they can get the million plus sales every year to recoup their investment. Because if they don't recoup their investment there won't be a P3.
The only one that doesn't is the Prop for some strange reason.
Another thing is, I don't think Parallax wants this market or to be associated with the P2 from the comments I've read here.
too bad ... missing so much publicity
The P2 is clearly being aimed at the commercial market so they can get the million plus sales every year to recoup their investment.
so I hope they succeed
I am working to convince our team to go for the prop2 as our next gen MCU -
but this will be 2 - max 3 digit sales volume ...
And who is going to port the Arduino libraries to GCC for the P2?
Why should anyone do that? It's already been pointed out that the Propeller's ASM (not to mention its architecture) was created for programmers and not compilers. Let the experienced Arduinoist searching for a new challenge discover a whole new world of learning and performance.
EDIT: Maybe it starts with a serial link to a P2, just to access specific functions in a single cog using a canned serial library. Then it becomes an SPI interface for higher bandwidth. Then it's a link to more than one cog. Then the P2 is used as a video display device for this dood's Arduino. Pretty soon the AVR is just an Arduino interface for his P2.
This is something I've said for a long time, after surviving (somewhat) an acquisition that resulted in absorption. The lesson I took away from that experience is an understanding of how smaller, higher priced, companies and products compete in a world where everyone else has reduced the marketplace to commodities where margins are measured in small percentages.
Here are the secrets I learned:
Define your product, what it can do and what it can't do, stick to your guns.
Don't alter your product to chase fads, someone else always has a better plan to race you to the bottom.
Offer superior customer service that goes beyond anything the competitors offer.
Enable the customer, give them the tools to help themselves and make them feel empowered.
Ensure the product works.
Here's what you can expect if you follow those rules:
You can charge higher prices for a product that seemingly doesn't match up competitively with competitors.
You will have a smaller user base than your competitor.
Your product longevity will be longer than your competitor.
Your customers will be fiercely loyal and stay with you even when evidence would suggest overwhelmingly they should switch to a faster, cheaper product.
You will have much, much, higher margins than your competitors.
You will be less nimble.
Here's why it isn't a bad place to be:
If your treat your customers well and provide better service than the competitor, they will want to stay with you because you make it less painful to be a customer. People don't like to change, they like familiarity, which gives them comfort. While you will have less customers overall, each customer will be spending more than a similar customer at a competitor. You will make up much of the perceived loss by simply having fewer, more profitable, customers. Having fewer customers also means less infrastructure to support those customers. Having to support 20,000 customers is easier than 200,000 customers. When your loyalty goes up, the long term support costs go down, so the longer you retain a customer, the less they cost to support. There is initial acquisition costs associated with each new customer, turnover causes these costs to rise and overall efficiency to decline. When you have a turnover of 2% versus 25%, you spend a lot less time supporting existing customers and you can spend less money overall acquiring customers if you don't have to make up for turnover.
These lessons were learned working in an Internet company that sold services, but they apply well to product companies because product companies can't survive on being product companies solely, they have to offer services, and those services are the frosting that keeps the customers returning and happy.
I agree with TinkersAlot...it all comes down to price..price..price...price...price...price. If the Prop II boards cost around $60-80, forget about it! People will buy very few props II and keep working with Arduino, RPi, and BBB. If the prop II boards costs around $25 to $45...people can afford to buy many boards and experiment with them. I own about 40 propeller I, because I love working with them and the price is right. I can do many experiments and projects with them. I also own two RPi(s) mostly because they are cheap. I am not a big fan of Linux, but the boards cost so little. If the Rpi costed over $50, I would probably own zero Rpi(s). Focus on the price of the Prop II protoboards! Get people in the door!
I don't think there are any major technical issues with supporting the Arduino libraries and IDE for the Prop. The issue is probably that there is little overlap between Prop users and Arduino users, and people who would know how to port the libraries and IDE. It seems like porting the libraries should be pretty straight-forward. The Arduino IDE uses GCC under the covers, so it may not be that hard to integrate PropGCC. It might be worthwhile for Parallax to pay a contractor a few 10's of thousands of dollars to port the Arduino IDE and libraries, and enter into the Arduino market.
I agree with TinkersAlot...it all comes down to price..price..price...price...price...price. If the Prop II boards cost around $60-80, forget about it! People will buy very few props II and keep working with Arduino, RPi, and BBB. If the prop II boards costs around $25 to $45...people can afford to buy many boards and experiment with them. I own about 40 propeller I, because I love working with them and the price is right. I can do many experiments and projects with them. I also own two RPi(s) mostly because they are cheap. I am not a big fan of Linux, but the boards cost so little. If the Rpi costed over $50, I would probably own zero Rpi(s). Focus on the price of the Prop II protoboards! Get people in the door!
But if you look at my corollary, you don't need to make 1 million boards with a 2% margin, you make 200,000 boards with a 25% margin.
I'm sorry, but the Raspberry Pi isn't a product, it's an educational endeavor that people confuse with a product. It was designed as a super low cost, high volume, education board.
The BeagleBone and other TI products were designed as reference platforms for their chips, so hardware designers could learn what it takes to use their chips. EDA with .4mm BGA and POP is insanely more difficult than with a 100 pin TQFP. TI *had* to do the beaglebone boards to open up markets outside of 2 or 3 cellphone makers.
That said, the cellphone makers have paid for TI's fab costs and design costs, thus the beaglebone boards are very low margin marketing devices that are intended as engineering and marketing exercises. TI can afford to subsidize the beaglebone products because the chips are already paid for by Motorola and a handful of other companies.
So, in closing, the Rpi and BBB are in no way any real competition for the P2, they are completely different environments. In fact, the Arduino UNO costs $35, yet I don't see the vitriol that people aim at Parallax, loaded for the Arduino folks.
The P2 is radically different in many ways than the AVR, PIC, Freescale, MIPS, and many other micros, it will find a niche that it it can fill exclusively, but longevity will allow it to find more general purpose applications where a strong performer and good design will win out over not getting to market 6 months late.
Timing is everything with products, if you are there first you can dominate and be the 800lb gorilla, if you are 6 months late you get to fight for table scraps. The P2 will represent this radical difference because even poorly programmed it will be scads faster than other solutions and quicker to market.
I agree that the RPi is a bit of a aberration, designed by educators and thrown out there without any need for those educator/designers to make any profit on it. It may be following the model of open-source software, which is to publish a product that works reasonably well, and then make money of customization and support for bigger customers. (FreeRTOS is one example) In any case the RPi is here to stay and initial supply limitations are easing up. Some serious (meaning commercial) users have indicated to me the design may not be as robust as needed for the commercial world (ie it crashes occasionally).
The BBB is quite a different animal. Yes the initial BB was subsidized to kickstart the project. We were looking very hard at it for an embedded Linux application (one using a few hundred a month). At the time the Linux was not complete and had audio out but not audio in, since then that has been fixed, but time to market drove us to another solution. Now that the BBB exists we might revisit that. I'm not a big Linux fan by any means, but it is a very typical case of a customer that had developed some software gluing together scripts and apps on a Linux system, it worked well enough and they needed to move it off a PC platform for cost, power and size. Now if you look at the whole thing most any embedded CPU could have done it, but it would have meant a large reinvention of code. I'm only telling this story to illustrate a very typical low to mid volume customer which should be the sweet spot for a small embedded vendor.
But that experience also got us great contacts at CircuitCo who actually builds the BBB. Yes it is below cost of what I could build it for, but by combining all the volume of customers like me, and all the protos for TI, and doing it in China, they have a product that they can make a comfortable margin on as a supplier. CircuitCo does no design, no support, Linux development or custom programming, they are just an assembly house. But for them this is a pretty good business. And from what we see so far looks to be a good product. So the BBB is here to stay and a viable product. Is it direct competition for the P2, well no if all you want is an embedded IO wiggling device, but if you want video, the BBB blows the doors off any P2 solution.
On another point above, I agree that Parallax should be funding an effort to move library support for the Arduino, that is if they want the hobbyist/educator market. The problem is there are 250K of those out there and probably 10-20K libraries, it's a daunting task, to compete with an open source community.
What? The thing is made by Sony and marketed by RS and Farnel. I'm sure they are happy to do that and make their cut just like any other product.
I could argue that the BeagleBone and co are not products, they are just freebie (almost) given out so as to hook developers. As you say the the chips were already paid for by the cell phone companies.
I do agree that the Raspi, Beagles and such are not in the same boat as the Propeller. And that the Props are radically different to other MCUs. Props and ARMs can be complementary not competitors. Although we might find those ARMs that are sprouting I/O processors are treading on Propeller turf.
On another point above, I agree that Parallax should be funding an effort to move library support for the Arduino, that is if they want the hobbyist/educator market. The problem is there are 250K of those out there and probably 10-20K libraries, it's a daunting task, to compete with an open source community.
I don't think moving the Arduino library to the Prop environs will do much but making the Propeller appear as a viable board type in the Arduino drop down board types would be a big help to converting folks.
On another point above, I agree that Parallax should be funding an effort to move library support for the Arduino, that is if they want the hobbyist/educator market. The problem is there are 250K of those out there and probably 10-20K libraries, it's a daunting task, to compete with an open source community.
I don't think moving the Arduino library to the Prop environs will do much but making the Propeller appear as a viable board type in the Arduino drop down board types would be a big help to converting folks.
And who is going to port the Arduino libraries to GCC for the P2? So far nothing but crickets and if Parallax doesn't give it's stamp of approval, it probably won't happen.
For purposes of education we are about to announce a new program on Saturday using GCC libraries and SimpleIDE. This program will make multicore easier than ever with the Propeller. And there's a hardware design to go with it, too. Replacing Arduinos isn't our motivation. Arduino does it's job well but we intend to show the Propeller's capabilities. We want to do what we do best.
Our goal is to provide the Parallax educational customer with the solution they've been asking for (open source, multi-platform, multi-lingual, C) as a follow-up to the BASIC Stamp, showing our best abilities in education. Our educational program will show how to program the Propeller Multicore for robotics and sensors, with an ongoing focus on electronics.
While Propeller 1 is the focus of the new educational program I am sure we will also port the code to Propeller 2 (or more likely, develop new libraries as needed). The compiler makes this fairly easy with a command line switch for the kernel and P2 target.
I just returned a few moments ago from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China where Jessica and I trained universities on the new Propeller C program. Some Parallax Insider posts will emerge showing the courses pretty soon.
Although we might find those ARMs that are sprouting I/O processors are treading on Propeller turf.
It's probably safe to say that there could be instances where these devices will be compared with the Propeller (or generic ARM + Prop) and vice versa for use in a particular application; no question that there is some overlap.
25 percent margin on chip boards...forget about it! The market has too many high power boards that are cheap. I know that the prop 2 is a different animal, but why would someone pay that large margin when chip companies are almost giving away boards that are complete systems.
I was just thinking that robotics is a good area for P2.
Also, as for marketing (way out of my area), maybe I'd try to show how the P2 would be better for robotics...
BTW: I happened to be at a university yesterday, looking at senior project in electrical & compute engineering.
Saw a few robots. One had about 8 Parallax Ping sensors on it, but they were using some other microcontroller
Just my opinion, but I think that, since they learn C and C++ in college, they would naturally lean toward a microcontroller that used this language.
So, I'm optomistic that the PropGCC effort will bring in a lot more customers...
I think chip companies' margins are a lot higher than people suppose. I would imagine microcontroller chips almost always sell from their manufacturers at several times the production cost. It has to be this way. It just doesn't work to sell for any less than that. Parallax' big business problem is that our cost-of-goods-sold is around 63% of our selling price, without even accounting for engineering. We are making less percentage than our suppliers and our resellers. It seems products like the Arduino, BBB, and RPi bend these rules by making nothing on engineering. I bet the IC manufacturers that make the critical chips for those boards are doing just fine with that arrangement, though, as their margins are healthy. It's not a sustainable model for a company like Parallax, however. We have huge engineering investments in Propeller chips that need to be recovered throughout the product line, as we don't have million-piece design wins.
"25 percent margin on chip boards...forget about it!"
Based on what? Say you can get the chip for $10, whatever it is. Say the cost of components on a board is another $10, and a board can be had for $5. So that's $25 right? A 25 percent margin on that is $6.25.
That $6.25 needs to pay everybody. You have a building, people working in it, postage, power, supplies, insurances of various kinds, distributors (maybe), retailers (maybe) and some expectation of profit to pay yourself. Is that enough? The answer is generally no, because all the people involved between the genesis of the product and you opening the package need to make enough to fund their lives so they can do the work to deliver the product to you. If that doesn't happen, that means other people are doing work for your benefit, not their own. Does this seem reasonable?
Now say you do it yourself. You source those components, and let's just say you can get them for $30, because you are not buying a lot of them, just enough for your own use. How long does it take to assemble? Do you make your own boards? Consumables, layout, etc... Maybe you have those made too, and even share a run with somebody. Postage, gas, time to get everything together, right? Then you build, test, and finally get to use the product? How many hours does that take? If you make minimum wage, or something close to that, let's say $10 just for grins. Does this whole process take a day total? A couple? Well, that's $160! Say you do it in your off time. That's a whole weekend that you spend obtaining that thing, and there are only 52 of those per year, right? How does that compete with personal time, studies, and your overall life ambitions?
Say it's delivered to your door via online purchase and the cost is double. Now it's $60! That's huge right! Double the cost! But, in terms of your time, you may only spend half an hour of your real time to get the package open, and your dollars buys you two days basically! That's two days you have to enjoy / use / build with the product. Given that two days costs $160 at low wage, buying two of them for only $60 is cheap!
This is why people pay margins.
They pay for the value other people worked to add to their lives through the product. If we had to make everything we used, we would be time poor, laboring just to live, maintain shelter, eat, etc... We pay other people so that we may have time for ourselves and we work for other people to make the money needed to buy the things that gain us the time or entertain us or feed us, so that we aren't living to work, working to live. That is where margins come from, and why they are paid. Just looking at cost of components, or raw specs / dollar ignores those people, and who wants to work for free, or be ignored, or valued so low they must work all their hours just to eat and live?
"but why would someone pay that large margin when chip companies are almost giving away boards that are complete systems?"
They do it for the exact same reasons listed above.
TI sells those $4.99 starter kits. I have one, and it's nice and it cost TI more money to take my order and ship it to me than I paid them, rendering the product and packaging and accessories free! And that's exactly what it is. They are big enough to give tons of them away in the hopes that just a few of those kits result in sales later on. TI makes it's money on the million chip design wins, as Chip just put it. The powerful systems for small amounts of money work in similar ways. The Pi often gets sold in kits and or costs more than the rock bottom cost when other people and resources are required to get it to you. Android PC systems are cheap, and the operating system, etc... is also used in phones, tablets and all manner of things, so the costs get distributed so that little tiny fractions of time are necessary, or they are giving them away, taking a risk, making an investment, hoping for sales later on. It's not reasonable to compare the value of something like that with a product that isn't subsidized or given away as a risk investment, etc... Two different things.
Now, let's just take the P1 for now. A P1 is pretty easy compared to any of those things. Some of this depends on the nature of the task at hand obviously. If you want to build up a cheap media player for your TV, a Pi or Droid PC, etc... rocks hard, and it's cheap and there is software for that written long ago that can be built quickly, meaning the work is already done. They don't have to do much to get one to you and you don't have to do much to make it go. Thin margins.
Doing that same task with a $4.99 TI ARM Launchpad is an entirely different thing! You are going to have to work hard to get it all sorted out, if it's even possible. Still a thin margin, but very expensive in terms of your own time. Say it takes a month to get it all done, compared to a few hours or a day to do it on a Pi. The cost of time for the Pi at low wage is $60, the cost of time for that TI thing might be $1200!
Now, you want to make a robot go, or measure and control something, etc... A P1 is kind of easy! And the easy means you spend less time getting it done, which is why you pay the money for it, even though it delivers much less in terms of power / dollar or some other simple metric. Those numbers do not really represent value as much as they do price and it's value we are buying.
A P1 board is also made here in the US, meaning we need to pay for people who live here as opposed to there where they make much less, but how we live here is different than how we live there. Do we want to live how they live there? If so, we can all work on smaller margins.
It all comes down to time. Your own time is limited and broken roughly into thirds. One to work, one to do what you want to do and one to sleep. And the work time needs to fund the sleep and do what we want time, which is how we all end up getting paid and again it's where margins come from in addition to supplies, etc.. needed during the course of spending that time.
Edit: early in life, time is cheap too. We have few dependencies, can live cheap, but as we age, those things tend to grow and soon an hour goes from $10 to $50 or more as time gets expensive, we have less of it, more responsibilities and so on. A student may not have much and will work the weekend to build their own thing. Somebody later in life will gladly pay solid margins because they are buying time they need to actually enjoy and use the product.
Price is an easy thing. Everybody wants it low, because that's optimal for them, however it may not be optimal for others. Value on the other hand is not as easy to quantify as our needs, station in life, goals and many other things impact how much value we may get at a given price, which again speaks to why people will pay for things that may seem high in terms of price, but are great deals in terms of value they realize from the purchase.
***Sorry for the distraction. Once in a while, these basic things are well worth consideration. Carry on.
All well and good. A chip on a board with a 100% mark up may well be good value for the end user when balanced against the cost of DIY, as Potato head points out. However that is not the end of the story. There is a lot of competition. If that end user can get something like what he want's for half the price he will do so.
In the hobbyist world that competition is in the form of Beagles, Pi's, assorted Arduinos and the like. We may point out that the Props are not in the same field as Linux based ARMs. Or we may point out that the Prop's are superior to Arduinos. No mater, in that array of offerings there is probably something that can do what user want's at a rock bottom price.
In the commercial world, I don't know any more, I'm getting a bit out of touch with that scene except in terms of fairly low volume, high mark up specialist items. Adepteva is about to deliver me a credit card sized board carrying a dual core ARM9 processor, plus a pile of FPGA logic, plus their own parallel 16 core parallel FPU chip, plus 1GB RAM, plus ethernet, USB and all the normal ARM board goodies. All for the princely sum of $100. That tells be that any Propeller board has to be well below that price point.
Comments
-Phil
I was going to go with,
"Dance with the horse that brung ya!"
And who is going to port the Arduino libraries to GCC for the P2? So far nothing but crickets and if Parallax doesn't give it's stamp of approval, it probably won't happen.
The sad thing is, other processors already have a Arduino type development environment and that includes the Pic32, ARM, MSP430, and 16 bit Pics. The only one that doesn't is the Prop for some strange reason.
Another thing is, I don't think Parallax wants this market or to be associated with the P2 from the comments I've read here. The P2 is clearly being aimed at the commercial market so they can get the million plus sales every year to recoup their investment. Because if they don't recoup their investment there won't be a P3.
Good thing the forums here are not the extent of the pond ....
Parallax doesn't need to give a stamp of approval. We need a P1 port for Martin's hardware.
Isn't SimpleIDE an Arduino type development environment for the Propeller?
It's simple to install, simple to use. Comes with some Prop specific libs. Is gaining great tutorial/educational material.
I'm sure Parallax want's to pursue commercial applications of the Prop II but I see no evidence that they will be neglecting their hobbyist/educational followers. As say there is a lot of effort going into the IDE and support materials. Perhaps they don't cover the PII yet but I'm sure that will come.
so I hope they succeed
I am working to convince our team to go for the prop2 as our next gen MCU -
but this will be 2 - max 3 digit sales volume ...
Why should anyone do that? It's already been pointed out that the Propeller's ASM (not to mention its architecture) was created for programmers and not compilers. Let the experienced Arduinoist searching for a new challenge discover a whole new world of learning and performance.
EDIT: Maybe it starts with a serial link to a P2, just to access specific functions in a single cog using a canned serial library. Then it becomes an SPI interface for higher bandwidth. Then it's a link to more than one cog. Then the P2 is used as a video display device for this dood's Arduino. Pretty soon the AVR is just an Arduino interface for his P2.
Quoted for truth.
The problem is, Parallax is so busy just trying to get the basics covered, that it doesn't have the time to do this. It's not that we don't want it!
But if you look at my corollary, you don't need to make 1 million boards with a 2% margin, you make 200,000 boards with a 25% margin.
I'm sorry, but the Raspberry Pi isn't a product, it's an educational endeavor that people confuse with a product. It was designed as a super low cost, high volume, education board.
The BeagleBone and other TI products were designed as reference platforms for their chips, so hardware designers could learn what it takes to use their chips. EDA with .4mm BGA and POP is insanely more difficult than with a 100 pin TQFP. TI *had* to do the beaglebone boards to open up markets outside of 2 or 3 cellphone makers.
That said, the cellphone makers have paid for TI's fab costs and design costs, thus the beaglebone boards are very low margin marketing devices that are intended as engineering and marketing exercises. TI can afford to subsidize the beaglebone products because the chips are already paid for by Motorola and a handful of other companies.
So, in closing, the Rpi and BBB are in no way any real competition for the P2, they are completely different environments. In fact, the Arduino UNO costs $35, yet I don't see the vitriol that people aim at Parallax, loaded for the Arduino folks.
The P2 is radically different in many ways than the AVR, PIC, Freescale, MIPS, and many other micros, it will find a niche that it it can fill exclusively, but longevity will allow it to find more general purpose applications where a strong performer and good design will win out over not getting to market 6 months late.
Timing is everything with products, if you are there first you can dominate and be the 800lb gorilla, if you are 6 months late you get to fight for table scraps. The P2 will represent this radical difference because even poorly programmed it will be scads faster than other solutions and quicker to market.
The BBB is quite a different animal. Yes the initial BB was subsidized to kickstart the project. We were looking very hard at it for an embedded Linux application (one using a few hundred a month). At the time the Linux was not complete and had audio out but not audio in, since then that has been fixed, but time to market drove us to another solution. Now that the BBB exists we might revisit that. I'm not a big Linux fan by any means, but it is a very typical case of a customer that had developed some software gluing together scripts and apps on a Linux system, it worked well enough and they needed to move it off a PC platform for cost, power and size. Now if you look at the whole thing most any embedded CPU could have done it, but it would have meant a large reinvention of code. I'm only telling this story to illustrate a very typical low to mid volume customer which should be the sweet spot for a small embedded vendor.
But that experience also got us great contacts at CircuitCo who actually builds the BBB. Yes it is below cost of what I could build it for, but by combining all the volume of customers like me, and all the protos for TI, and doing it in China, they have a product that they can make a comfortable margin on as a supplier. CircuitCo does no design, no support, Linux development or custom programming, they are just an assembly house. But for them this is a pretty good business. And from what we see so far looks to be a good product. So the BBB is here to stay and a viable product. Is it direct competition for the P2, well no if all you want is an embedded IO wiggling device, but if you want video, the BBB blows the doors off any P2 solution.
On another point above, I agree that Parallax should be funding an effort to move library support for the Arduino, that is if they want the hobbyist/educator market. The problem is there are 250K of those out there and probably 10-20K libraries, it's a daunting task, to compete with an open source community.
I could argue that the BeagleBone and co are not products, they are just freebie (almost) given out so as to hook developers. As you say the the chips were already paid for by the cell phone companies.
I do agree that the Raspi, Beagles and such are not in the same boat as the Propeller. And that the Props are radically different to other MCUs. Props and ARMs can be complementary not competitors. Although we might find those ARMs that are sprouting I/O processors are treading on Propeller turf.
I don't think moving the Arduino library to the Prop environs will do much but making the Propeller appear as a viable board type in the Arduino drop down board types would be a big help to converting folks.
IMHO
I don't think moving the Arduino library to the Prop environs will do much but making the Propeller appear as a viable board type in the Arduino drop down board types would be a big help to converting folks.
IMHO
For purposes of education we are about to announce a new program on Saturday using GCC libraries and SimpleIDE. This program will make multicore easier than ever with the Propeller. And there's a hardware design to go with it, too. Replacing Arduinos isn't our motivation. Arduino does it's job well but we intend to show the Propeller's capabilities. We want to do what we do best.
Our goal is to provide the Parallax educational customer with the solution they've been asking for (open source, multi-platform, multi-lingual, C) as a follow-up to the BASIC Stamp, showing our best abilities in education. Our educational program will show how to program the Propeller Multicore for robotics and sensors, with an ongoing focus on electronics.
While Propeller 1 is the focus of the new educational program I am sure we will also port the code to Propeller 2 (or more likely, develop new libraries as needed). The compiler makes this fairly easy with a command line switch for the kernel and P2 target.
I just returned a few moments ago from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China where Jessica and I trained universities on the new Propeller C program. Some Parallax Insider posts will emerge showing the courses pretty soon.
25 percent margin on chip boards...forget about it! The market has too many high power boards that are cheap. I know that the prop 2 is a different animal, but why would someone pay that large margin when chip companies are almost giving away boards that are complete systems.
Also, as for marketing (way out of my area), maybe I'd try to show how the P2 would be better for robotics...
BTW: I happened to be at a university yesterday, looking at senior project in electrical & compute engineering.
Saw a few robots. One had about 8 Parallax Ping sensors on it, but they were using some other microcontroller
Just my opinion, but I think that, since they learn C and C++ in college, they would naturally lean toward a microcontroller that used this language.
So, I'm optomistic that the PropGCC effort will bring in a lot more customers...
but this makes no sense
the Arduino Multi Core IS the Arduino in this scenario
Based on what? Say you can get the chip for $10, whatever it is. Say the cost of components on a board is another $10, and a board can be had for $5. So that's $25 right? A 25 percent margin on that is $6.25.
That $6.25 needs to pay everybody. You have a building, people working in it, postage, power, supplies, insurances of various kinds, distributors (maybe), retailers (maybe) and some expectation of profit to pay yourself. Is that enough? The answer is generally no, because all the people involved between the genesis of the product and you opening the package need to make enough to fund their lives so they can do the work to deliver the product to you. If that doesn't happen, that means other people are doing work for your benefit, not their own. Does this seem reasonable?
Now say you do it yourself. You source those components, and let's just say you can get them for $30, because you are not buying a lot of them, just enough for your own use. How long does it take to assemble? Do you make your own boards? Consumables, layout, etc... Maybe you have those made too, and even share a run with somebody. Postage, gas, time to get everything together, right? Then you build, test, and finally get to use the product? How many hours does that take? If you make minimum wage, or something close to that, let's say $10 just for grins. Does this whole process take a day total? A couple? Well, that's $160! Say you do it in your off time. That's a whole weekend that you spend obtaining that thing, and there are only 52 of those per year, right? How does that compete with personal time, studies, and your overall life ambitions?
Say it's delivered to your door via online purchase and the cost is double. Now it's $60! That's huge right! Double the cost! But, in terms of your time, you may only spend half an hour of your real time to get the package open, and your dollars buys you two days basically! That's two days you have to enjoy / use / build with the product. Given that two days costs $160 at low wage, buying two of them for only $60 is cheap!
This is why people pay margins.
They pay for the value other people worked to add to their lives through the product. If we had to make everything we used, we would be time poor, laboring just to live, maintain shelter, eat, etc... We pay other people so that we may have time for ourselves and we work for other people to make the money needed to buy the things that gain us the time or entertain us or feed us, so that we aren't living to work, working to live. That is where margins come from, and why they are paid. Just looking at cost of components, or raw specs / dollar ignores those people, and who wants to work for free, or be ignored, or valued so low they must work all their hours just to eat and live?
"but why would someone pay that large margin when chip companies are almost giving away boards that are complete systems?"
They do it for the exact same reasons listed above.
TI sells those $4.99 starter kits. I have one, and it's nice and it cost TI more money to take my order and ship it to me than I paid them, rendering the product and packaging and accessories free! And that's exactly what it is. They are big enough to give tons of them away in the hopes that just a few of those kits result in sales later on. TI makes it's money on the million chip design wins, as Chip just put it. The powerful systems for small amounts of money work in similar ways. The Pi often gets sold in kits and or costs more than the rock bottom cost when other people and resources are required to get it to you. Android PC systems are cheap, and the operating system, etc... is also used in phones, tablets and all manner of things, so the costs get distributed so that little tiny fractions of time are necessary, or they are giving them away, taking a risk, making an investment, hoping for sales later on. It's not reasonable to compare the value of something like that with a product that isn't subsidized or given away as a risk investment, etc... Two different things.
Now, let's just take the P1 for now. A P1 is pretty easy compared to any of those things. Some of this depends on the nature of the task at hand obviously. If you want to build up a cheap media player for your TV, a Pi or Droid PC, etc... rocks hard, and it's cheap and there is software for that written long ago that can be built quickly, meaning the work is already done. They don't have to do much to get one to you and you don't have to do much to make it go. Thin margins.
Doing that same task with a $4.99 TI ARM Launchpad is an entirely different thing! You are going to have to work hard to get it all sorted out, if it's even possible. Still a thin margin, but very expensive in terms of your own time. Say it takes a month to get it all done, compared to a few hours or a day to do it on a Pi. The cost of time for the Pi at low wage is $60, the cost of time for that TI thing might be $1200!
Now, you want to make a robot go, or measure and control something, etc... A P1 is kind of easy! And the easy means you spend less time getting it done, which is why you pay the money for it, even though it delivers much less in terms of power / dollar or some other simple metric. Those numbers do not really represent value as much as they do price and it's value we are buying.
A P1 board is also made here in the US, meaning we need to pay for people who live here as opposed to there where they make much less, but how we live here is different than how we live there. Do we want to live how they live there? If so, we can all work on smaller margins.
It all comes down to time. Your own time is limited and broken roughly into thirds. One to work, one to do what you want to do and one to sleep. And the work time needs to fund the sleep and do what we want time, which is how we all end up getting paid and again it's where margins come from in addition to supplies, etc.. needed during the course of spending that time.
Edit: early in life, time is cheap too. We have few dependencies, can live cheap, but as we age, those things tend to grow and soon an hour goes from $10 to $50 or more as time gets expensive, we have less of it, more responsibilities and so on. A student may not have much and will work the weekend to build their own thing. Somebody later in life will gladly pay solid margins because they are buying time they need to actually enjoy and use the product.
Price is an easy thing. Everybody wants it low, because that's optimal for them, however it may not be optimal for others. Value on the other hand is not as easy to quantify as our needs, station in life, goals and many other things impact how much value we may get at a given price, which again speaks to why people will pay for things that may seem high in terms of price, but are great deals in terms of value they realize from the purchase.
***Sorry for the distraction. Once in a while, these basic things are well worth consideration. Carry on.
In the hobbyist world that competition is in the form of Beagles, Pi's, assorted Arduinos and the like. We may point out that the Props are not in the same field as Linux based ARMs. Or we may point out that the Prop's are superior to Arduinos. No mater, in that array of offerings there is probably something that can do what user want's at a rock bottom price.
In the commercial world, I don't know any more, I'm getting a bit out of touch with that scene except in terms of fairly low volume, high mark up specialist items. Adepteva is about to deliver me a credit card sized board carrying a dual core ARM9 processor, plus a pile of FPGA logic, plus their own parallel 16 core parallel FPU chip, plus 1GB RAM, plus ethernet, USB and all the normal ARM board goodies. All for the princely sum of $100. That tells be that any Propeller board has to be well below that price point.
I was thinking in terms of 25% (profit) margin...All your costs would be covered and included in the margin. The 25% would be pure profit.
The profit is up to the entrepreneur. Price is what people are willing to pay. Value helps them decide to pay it.
A couple of percent profit might make sense, as might 50 percent. Depends on the value you see.
"The 25% would be pure profit." Is easy to say. But not so clear to me how you do it.
Pitch the price too high and you won't attract customers. No sales no profits.
Pitch the price too low and you might get lots of customers but no profit.
How to guestimate the happy medium?