Propeller Activity Board .vs Propeller Activity Board WX??
mindrobots
Posts: 6,506
in Propeller 1
Ok, what do I get or $30 more? Beefier voltage regulators? An Xbee socket to hold a WIFI something...wait, the original had a socket for Xbee devices. So I'm back to higher current capability for $30?
Can somebody tell me what I'm missing? (Beside my $30 less expensive original Activity Board.)
Can somebody tell me what I'm missing? (Beside my $30 less expensive original Activity Board.)
Comments
On my end, having this on robots, it's well worth the difference to be able to program it wirelessly. A complete life saver. These kids drive robots off the tables and break them because of the USB.
Thanks for the info. Your one liner above made it clear what the improvement is. Parallax needs to put that as a bullet item on the product page...much more important than jumper wires and rubber feet in my opinion!
OK, I'll try one.
My Chinese treaded robot will start out with a full Parallax electronics stack: Li-ion power pack, DHB-10 motor controller and a new Activity Board WX. We'll see where it evolves from that starting point.
Please keep us posted on your treaded robot project. Wish we still had a blog to post projects to.
John Abshier
It looks like I'm back to my original assumption....$30 gets me beefier voltage regulators.
It might be time to add a Pi-Zero to the mix to act as a programming access point...until "Real Soon Now" rolls around on my calendar.
There's no difference between actually loading a C or a Spin program. The Propeller wasn't modified to be able to support C. You could use the same wireless programming technique to load code originally written in Spin, C, PropBasic, PLASMA (for lft's Turbulence demo), or any other Propeller language.
Many of you are engineers and you can reverse-cost the Bill of Materials (BOM) and create a labor estimate for the Propeller Activity Board. I'd even be happy to post the costed BOM right here on the forums so you can see it for yourself. You would notice that our labor and materials costs to build a Propeller Activity Board (this version and the prior one) are about $40.
Do you think that we should be happy with $39 of gross profit? Do you want us to be happy with $39 of gross profit? We're not even making this much.
First, there's an average selling price. Some boards go to distributors at a discount; others go to schools at a discount due to volume purchases. An average selling price is about 70% of the retail ($35 at the former $49 price, or about $56 on the new $79 price). Prior to the price increase, Parallax was losing money on every Propeller Activity Board. Now you could conclude we probably profit about $16 per board.
Next, this board is so much more than a pile of components with the improved voltage regulator system mentioned above. We've got a full year of non-recurring engineering costs in it too. . .and software. . .and hardware to support the upcoming WiFi programmability. Do you think that Parallax warrants a small return on these pieces, or not?
And if you accept all of these points, do you think it's a reasonable return to Parallax that we pocket only a $16 gross profit per board - something around 28% simply on the hardware? This margin has to cover design costs, software costs, and everything else related to the product (documentation, photography, putting it up for sale, internal training, drawings, etc). Not to mention health benefits, building lease and insurance.
This margin is something slightly more than Amazon takes (they put stuff in boxes and ship it out) and around that of a clothing store (is a shirt an intellectual reinvestment in one's self?) when garments are on sale. What else can you buy for this price that allows you to create even more neat products, applications and solutions that are so much more valuable than the cost of the hardware?
The board was underpriced before and it still is today. But the market demands low-cost, capable products these days so we do our best to keep the prices low.
Ken Gracey
A 1 cent component costs many times that just to place it on a board! Firstly, these parts are now tiny and the pick and place machines drop a number of these parts. They have to be purchased, stock counts maintained (else you run out of them), held in stock (even if you only require one per board they often come on reels of 3000 or more - if you only anticipate building 100, then you have to amortise 3000 over 100 which gives a 30c cost), inventory storage, computer and software costs for inventory control plus people to enter and run it.
It takes a considerable time and cost to initially setup the pick-n-place machine, and reasonable times for each subsequent build of this board. These add significantly to board cost.
All these things are before any profit!
2. Why does the RaspPi sell so many vs. Propeller boards, you might ask? Buzz features! "Linux!" "Ethernet!" "HDMI!" These are words that millions of potential users are already familiar with and cue into immediately. Compare that with "Propeller" and "Spin."
3. With millions of users, a vast community has built up to support the RaspPi, resulting in less pressure on the devs to do the actual support.
Parallax has chosen a more low-profile approach to their product offerings that results in lower overall volumes and requires a more hands-on approach to support. This is a Good Thing -- especially for educators -- because they can forge a singular relationship with the manufacturer, without having to rely on a huge user community for possibly contradictory information and assistance. But it comes at a dollar cost that must ultimately be borne by the customer (e.g. a school district). But in the long run, that cost is miniscule, compared with the soul-sucking hours that might be spent filtering thousands of "helpful" threads on the multitude of available RaspPi forums and blogs.
Long story short: dollars and cents are not the only cost a user incurs with any purchase. You have to consider the bigger picture and the additional value received for what might be a larger initial outlay.
-Phil
The two biggest alternatives to the Propeller in education are actually the RasPi and Arduino. This is interesting because the intended uses are so different, but teachers new to this can consider them somewhat interchangeable.
Raspberry Pi is a non-profit foundation and Arduino is a highly-copied (non-royalty to the founders) product. Of course, educators are often met with a confusing point of entry in education. At Parallax we deliver the whole effort in a tidy package with the support you identified, above.
This evening I'm helping a teacher in Chicago get his Ping))) sensor to work properly on his ActivityBot. He wanted to use e-mail, and we reply to e-mail. His problem will be solved before class in the morning.
Ken Gracey