Using an Arduino as a robot controller (2010 and beyond?)

[IKE]

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

A few things:

- (Most importantly IMHO) The RC has a lot of custom software in it that someone had to write (to talk to the OI, disable robots safely, etc). Also, it had to be designed, heavily tested, and supported (taking customer calls and sending IFI reps to every event for the last 8 years). This creates a large up-front cost (to pay engineers to do this design and development) that has to be amortized across the number of RCs sold during its lifespan.

You can make the same comparisons between the new CRio and other PowerPC-based boards. The CRio is easily 10x more expensive than other PowerPC-based devices on the market, and that is probably in large part due to the level of testing, robustness, and low volume nature of the product.

Basically, the cost of these components is the price we pay for getting the kinds of features and support we've come to expect.

To elaborate a little further:

If you read Wired Magazine (two issues ago) they interviewed the guys that originally designed and made the Arduino (a good article). They posted their designs up for free and allowed the community to help them design and trouble shoot all of their problems. They basically put 0 n the price for the ER&D for these. To take this into consideration, say 1 very skilled EE did all of the design for the IFI controller in 1 year. If you paid such person $50K for that year, and you sold 10,000 controllers a year, it would take 5 years to pay for his 1 year of work if $1,000 per controller was earmarked for ER&D. This is the one reason why anything well designed in low volume is very expensive.

Doing a free ER&D version and allowing the community to troubleshoot your problems works very well for hobbyists (they are forgiving of errors and bugs), but would be a huge headache for non-expert teams.