Tether heating up!

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by russell

Innovation First totally rips you off on those. All they have is two chips in them that cost seven dollars each without a bulk discount! Then there are probably a few capacitors and such for measuring the analog inputs, but it certainly isnt worth the 500 dollars they want for a new RC.

Wow, that is so far from the truth... You do realize that there is a fixed cost associated with any product which is the engineer's time to design (and write software for) said product? This is very expensive, and IFI only gets to ammortize that cost over a few thousand units. The cost to create the hardware design & software though is about the same as something that another company may sell millions of for $100 apiece.

IFI puts out a very high quality product year after year and goes out of their way to meet the unique needs of FIRST. You can't get that from just any old company.

Why do you think a copy of Windows XP costs $199 (or whatever it is these days)? It's only a 10 cent CD with a thin manual, right? Wrong - you're paying for the development effort that went into the software contained on that CD. With IFI, you're paying for the development that goes into the RC and OI, as well as the field control system that integrates so well with them.

[BrianBSL]

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

Wow, that is so far from the truth... You do realize that there is a fixed cost associated with any product which is the engineer's time to design (and write software for) said product? This is very expensive, and IFI only gets to ammortize that cost over a few thousand units. The cost to create the hardware design & software though is about the same as something that another company may sell millions of for $100 apiece.

IFI puts out a very high quality product year after year and goes out of their way to meet the unique needs of FIRST. You can't get that from just any old company.

Why do you think a copy of Windows XP costs $199 (or whatever it is these days)? It's only a 10 cent CD with a thin manual, right? Wrong - you're paying for the development effort that went into the software contained on that CD. With IFI, you're paying for the development that goes into the RC and OI, as well as the field control system that integrates so well with them.

Agreed. Also, I bet if you were to spec out every item in that RC you would approach the $100-$150 mark. I'm not one to ever say that IFI is a great deal, but its not $14 to make the thing either.