On Saturday, January 4, 2014 4:44:15 PM UTC-6, monahanz wrote:
Dave is that the only board you need to get going to get started? If so, I can gift you an old V1 Console-IO board I have.
I'd like a prop console board too, perhaps we could saw that single board in half and ship 1/2 to me and 1/2 to Dave, there is an ancient story of justice along these lines. It doesn't scale.
Now if boards are constructed with non-machine pin sockets and have a stockpile of almost all the parts, the limiting cost is the $23 PCB and keeping PCB costs low is a big deal. However, "decent quality" machine pin sockets push $1 a piece, gold plate obviously a whole nother level of expense, then theres usually some weird unobtanium thing or another that requires special orders with special shipping and handling. So there's a whole nother market where the PCB price is practically a rounding error. Like trying to obtain FDC chips from China and discontinued TO-3 regulators and building backplanes where each backplane socket is $16. I just (partially) soldered together two bus extender PCBs yesterday where I stuck a $16 socket on a $23 board so this is not theoretical. There's a lot of $20 boards out there with two $15 ZIF sockets aka $30 for two eeproms, etc.
I'm acknowledge some people would flinch at the idea of a $30 or $40 or $50 board, but lots of people wouldn't. I could see the market naturally developing where a new board has bulk orders of 20 or 40 at a time and the price remains the low $20 but if you really want a propeller console I/O instead of an old interfacer4 like I've got, I wouldn't much blink till it got over $50 per pcb.