Plus component prices are some kind of dark arts, I’m totally sure they have another price than you.
BTW: the most expensive PIC32MZ is around 14 $ for one, at digikey. 100 are around 12 per piece.
Indeed. When making a product, a race to the bottom pricing is seldom a good strategy. You also need to take the supply chain management and liabilities into account. RasPi or NanoPi are great for prototyping runs, but I wouldn’t want to order 1.000 of them to power my customers’ gateways around the world. I can however have 1.000 32bit MCU’s delivered to my doorstep tomorrow at a very interesting price, and be sure that they will operate perfectly according to specs. There is a reason the TTN gateway uses PIC32 and not a RasPi.
Having a open source packet forwarder that runs on a 32bit micro surely opens a lot of perspectives for affordable commercial gateways other than TTN.
To be fair, I’ve got my own picture attached. When I invested in November 2015 I was expecting the July 2016 date to be there or thereabouts. The whole point of investing was to get something ‘first to the market’. Now it’s days have past and it’s not exciting anymore - just continual delay emails coming out. At least I got a Nintendo Switch now to keep me company for the same price as this gateway where I’ve got nothing to show for it.
The amount of emails building up hope “we’re almost there” to then have “oh, found a firmware issue, it’ll be in a few months time” - it all wears thin in the end, no matter of how many lovely photos you have of something on the production line that hasn’t actually made it to me yet.
Paid for : November 2015
ETA for delivery: July 2016
New ETA for delivery: Some time never
Of course you shouldn’t use the Raspberry Pi or NanoPi boards if shipping 1000s of products. That’s what the the Raspberry Pi Compute Module and many other such module boards are for (many at very reasonable prices) or for many 1000s you can skip the modules and use the many SoC available directly.
But it was you who suggested the Raspberry Pi as an option.
Well yes, it’s same reason why there’s a Microchip logo on the gateway board. Can’t really see any other benefit a project like this would get from using a more expensive platform on a closed source (“Harmony”) OS.
My primary reason for excitement was the opportunity to have a open source packet forwarder that runs on a 32bit MCU, which will allow for cost shaving compared to the traditional RasPi approach. No-one will attempt a commercial gateway production with a RasPi, but will contemplate it wit a MCU integrated on the RF board. Including myself, because this was one of the missing pieces I was waiting for. I do want to run it on a plain Cortex-M4 tho, let’s see how portable it is.
Look at https://github.com/Lora-net/picoGW_mcu the lora-gateway runs on a STM32.
And there are people running packet-forwarder in STM32 too with the original untouched source code, just adding a POSIX library/emulator.
But there is nothing wrong with using the RPi. We used 1000’s of the original board in a product and they keep on running and running. The Compute module wasn’t available back in the day and the only show in town was the original on. Works a dream. The RPi foundation were very, very supportive to industry.
We share your frustration. The only thing we can do is move through all the challenges of the delayed components and the all the hard bits about hardware development.
We aimed high by going for this price point in our ambition. And that challenge was bigger than we expected. At the moment all investments by the Kickstarter backers are going towards the out of pocket costs only and our company is investing heavily in all the work.
Hope you can imagine we have the same frustration and are with you and doing everything we can to get the products with you. We hope that through continuous communication and updates we keep everyone informed.
Oh my, no it is not easy. And we are adding some additional challenges to that like over the air updates, secure packet forwarder so it works on public networks, plug and play setup, lots of high quality documentation and videos and tutorials.
That’s true using the Raspberry Pi board is (cost, technically) effective up to point and I also see it very much like many PC makers - unless you’re Dell or some other big manufacturer you don’t really make their own motherboards, but buy a ready made one from Asus/Supermicro/etc.
I wouldn’t consider the Pi very robust though, especially the power supply section. There are others in the same spirit and price range which may be more adequate.
Actually MYiR recently announced a nice board based on NXP i.MX 6 rated for industrial applications for only $25 http://www.myirtech.com/list.asp?id=561. I feel it would make a nice gateway board.
I don’t really like the title, does not really respect the hard work by the team and our partners. Does anybody mind me changing it to What is the status of the TTN Gateway?
Working hard in itself is not a virtue, the only thing that counts is getting results which means in this case getting out to the Kickstarter backers. Complaining about the amount of money that has to be poured into this adventure does not make your case stronger. Do you think that in a commercial setting you would be allowed to over-run a project for more than a year? You would be out of your job long before!!
Come on, Wienke, you made such a big splash of TTN before you were anyway near sure that you could really deliver what was promised. Shit happens, this is not what you had wished or hoped for but be a man and make sure that TTN does not sink like your previous enterprise. We are running terribly out of time!!
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(did not do it myself btw)