Heard across a street. Highly intelligent. A bike alarm like no other! $210 CAD. Direct from manufacturer: $120 CAD.
When an electronics circuit is validated on a bread-board, the next stage may be to build it on a padboard. For commercialization (i.e. to turn it into a mass-produced product), this is turned into a PCB. This is what you’d typically see in a product that has electronics within it. (There is also IC/chips fabrication, but that is a whole different level I won’t get into.)
The post-Covid supply crisis has shot up the prices for manufacturing PCBs. It can now cost hundreds of dollars for a few PCBs, when two years ago it might’ve cost tens!
This means higher prices for consumer goods. As far as I know, large companies have not yet passed this on to consumers. Are they eating it, hoping that this will be a short-term pain? But, supplies are not expected to normalize until a year from now!
Certainly, for a small producer of a newly-invented product, the costs cannot be absorbed; there is not capital for even completing the project, or for paying one’s own rent, let alone for any interim cost-absorption!
A few PCBs have finally been ordered, to test. The micro-controller (or ‘CPU’, to put it in lay-men’s terms) has been changed to one that is not out-of-stock, though it is still many times more expensive than it was pre-Covid. And one part is missing, had to be found and purchased separately, and will have to be hand-soldered onto the PCB! I cannot say that I look forward to soldering SMD components.
Oh yeah, at least one mount had to be changed because a component of the right foot-print could not be found.
The prices I was quoted for these 5 PCBs ranged from $90 USD to $450 USD! A far cry from pre-Covid!
But, I was lucky in that, on Thursday, only one component was out-of-stock. The day before, a few were, and likely a few are _today_.
Ordered and received an initial batch of 2 PCBs, for testing. This is with a new micro-controller, because the original one I worked with, for the past few years, has become too expensive and too out-of-stock at suppliers.
So, now, I gotta find out how to connect to the damned thing, and then ‘port’ the code to it!
The PCB possibly works. Further tests are called for, but I am in the middle of other work.
It was a tremendous pain just to get to the stage of being able to write code to it. There are numerous takes on this, more or less along the same line, but with enough variants that nothing worked.