Pyboard clone

[deshipu]

It is interesting that the price of the pyboard (from the same seller) is 15.5 US$ and the Skin boards are sold for ~17 US$ and the cost of the componnents on the skin boards is less than 3 US$

Having designed and sold some electronic stuff myself recently, I think I can shed some light on that mystery. You see, the components are not the main cost of such a product, especially when it just has entered the market. The design, assembly (when it's not yet optimized), testing, quality control and rejectes, library code, documentation, support, packaging, shipping and returns constitute the bulk of your costs, at least until you can sell a lot of devices and spread those costs a bit, and also optimize your processes. If you think about this from that angle, it also makes sense why the cloned pyboard is cheaper than the new skins — it's already designed, tested, optimized for production, documented and has all the code written for it — so you only have quality control and packaging and shipping to worry about, and they most likely even skip the quality control step.

Making a product and selling it is on a completely different level of work than making a prototype for your hobby.

[pythoncoder]

Very true. Software products aren't much better either.

[Roberthh]

Just for interest, I bought such an Pyboard clone. What I got is not bad, not good. It's working, but the production quality is inferior to that of the genuine Pyboard. It's the little things that are missing, like the fine drilling at the little "ears" for board mounting (funny), and a lower quality of imprints on the board, and most critical a worse soldering & cleaning process. That they swapped the greed and red LED is maybe the least problem. I uploaded a few pictures for comparison here: https://github.com/robert-hh/stuff. At the USB connector the difference is most obvious. I have also the impression of it being less reliable, but that requires more testing. My first impression is, not use it for applications with a demand for reliability.
Like the saying is: "There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey."

P.S.: At the picture of the genuine PCB USB, you see that I replaced the SI-diode myself by hand soldering by a Schottky-Diode. So that does not look so nice soldered. But the main difference is the soldering of the USB connector.