Do products go to market with Arduino?
Dr. Michael A Morgan wrote 11/05/2015 at 15:19 • 0 pointsI'm interested to hear from you all whether consumer products are launched on the market with Arduino as the processing system? Or do they go the traditional route with the PCB board? We are currently prototyping with Arduino now and will beta test with it, but need to determine which pathway to move forward with for full production and market launch. I appreciate your thoughts.
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I guess you could put a product on the market with a full Arduino in it, but I'm not sure why you would want to. If you're thinking about using an Uno, you should keep in mind that the AtMega328 doesn't require that many additional parts to run. Check out the first link below for details. The first link's example uses a USB to Serial breakout board from spark fun, but if your product doesn't need a USB you could leave that out. I bought a few 328s and necessary components a few months back and I don't think they came out to more than a 4 or 5 bucks a per Uno ( - USB). The second link shows how you can use an Uno as an in circuit programmer. I don't think there's any way it would be cost effective to put the whole board in a product.
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Standalone
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoToBreadboard
This was just for the AtMega328. I haven't looked into what it takes to run the chips from the more advanced boards. I'm assuming since they cost more the you'd save even more money by only using the chips. The 328 is useful for a lot of products though and if your only reason for upgrading to one of the Uno's big brothers is to get more I.O. pins, I.O. expander chips are pretty cheap.
My last piece of advice, if you do go with 328 for a product, is make absolutely sure that you get the AtMega328p-pu. Do not buy a bunch of AtMega328pu chips without that extra "p". They're practically the same thing, one of them uses a little less power than the other, but they have a different ID number in some register that you're Arduino board checks when you try to upload the bootloader and trying to fix that problem will give you a huge headache.
Hope some of that helped.
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If we deliberate on the technical matter of this question the answer is clear: huge volume and low cost. Arduino' boards and shields, will not participate in this market. However, the most important point here is the needing of the final consumer and how your product will satisfy their necessities. In my opinion the experience of the consumer will give you the right answer "arduino or traditional PCB".
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In low volume (or very expensive) projects using an actual arduino board makes perfect sense, that means the processor is modular and you can go pick up any replacement one that conforms to the standard, blow the code into it over serial, and it's good to go. I personally use the pro mini in projects because it's so small, has all the associated circuitry I need, and can just be slotted into a socket on a custom board. As far as the code, if you don't need efficiency then the abstraction layer that is arduino can be helpful for rapid development of new features and products. The code will run just fine on custom boards, just pick the one you'd like to integrate, copy the relevant chunks of the schematic, and run some custom boards (if you'd rather not be modular/need to shave costs).
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Great thanks for your valuable insight it is very much appreciated. I will take all of your suggestions into consideration moving forward.
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I have a product that is going to market end of this year. We will be using both an electric imp board and arduino ethernet boards. Alex Rich is exactly correct about low volume projects. We developed a shield for both boards, and will simply plug them together and install in some industrial machines. If and when sale increase we will explore having single board solutions made. But for now it doesn't make sense to put that much time and money in for less than 100 units.
Also, I would like to point out that arduino itself is a consumer product as well as all the shields that go with it. I think what it really comes down to is what is your product and what is your market. Arduinos, shields, single board clones of arduinos, and all the rest of the products out there are just tools. You have to pick the correct tool for the job. Sometimes that is arduino, and sometimes it is not.
Josh
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Arduino is efficient with prototyping due to its rich resources. As to consumer product, it would have so many limitations. As to switch platform for massive production, you need to transplant all the working code in arduino to others. This might be painful since you have to restart from very beginning.
You'd better to seperate your coding with logic algorithm layer driver layer and one hardware abstraction layer as the interface for your algorithm.
Considering coding transplanting, you will ONLY change the driver layer with minimum effort.
Also, arduino code is well encapsulated with C++ while many ARM platform is using C code. The majority of the work is to drive the same hardware resource (I2C/SPI/UART) in different language.
Actually, I am on a project to do such code transplanting automatically by seperate all the hardware access to atomic level and keep logic the same. My thoughts is to import arduino code and transform it into visual flowcharts. By adding the mapping library between atomic hardware access in flowchart and target MCU, we will directly had design ready code for target platform since algorithm part is always the same in different platform.
However it is just a prototyping and can not be used for commercial now.
You can also follow my project status on hackaday.io
https://hackaday.io/project/8246-make-electronics-with-ipad
http://wikit.co
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I wonder what happens with the software once you use a custom board. Do you usually just burn an Arduino bootloader to it and program it as you would Arduino, or do you use the ISP programmer to just burn your firmware directly? Do you use the Arduino libraries, or do you rewrite the software to talk to the hardware directly?
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A full Arduino is super inefficient compared to a custom circuit in any kind of production run.
- Component costs in quantity are just a few dollars
- It's $30. You can't use $4 clones from China, because you can't get proper RoHS certs etc to be able to legally sell it in bulk
- The form factor is huge, compared to an identical circuit with only the headers / peripherals you need
There are other technical reasons it's better to roll your own solution for a product, but the money angle talks :)
Obviously you're not going to pay an EE to design a board for a product run of 10 units, but you can see that the break-even point isn't that far off.
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You mean taking one of the stock Arduino boards and sticking it in a product? I'm sure people do it especially for low volume stuff where making a custom board and getting it populated might be more expensive than buying arduinos. This is just modular design and is done all the time using Arduinos and many other "modules." An arduino is just a microcontroller module, many other types exist. People use modules in real products all the time for GPS, bluetooth, wifi, LCD screens, etc. The issue comes with larger production runs, Arduinos come with a retail markup, plus they are not tightly integrated for your design (they will likely have a bunch of stuff you don't need and be missing a few things you do need). If you make your own custom board you have the advantage of tight integration as well as not having to pay a middle man.
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