[Coco] CoCo4! 50% done!

[Mark McDougall]

On 6/02/2014 9:03 AM, Mark Marlette wrote:

> Whoever takes this on, will basically have to have $20K in funds for this
> project. As I can't speak for everyone, $20K to go play with little to no
> return on the investment and take on all the risk is a lot to ask.

> If the NRE is not distributed across the sales of X number of system. Who
> pays it? The developer? Normally so but with little to no profit margin,
> hard to do. Guessing the NRE would be at least 10+% of the price in a 100
> board run.

I'm loathe to weigh in again on the tri-annual "Coco4" thread but I must say 
that this time 'round there's less pie-in-the-sky and more common sense 
being put forward. I'm wondering if Gary's failed Kickstarter has educated 
some on what sort of NRE costs are involved!?!

I'd claim that even Mark's estimates above are a bit conservative, and I 
would definitely point out that they certainly don't include the engineer's 
salary; they'd be doing it for the love of it.

I'm currently attempting to rope a few of my colleagues into collaborating 
on a rather ambitious multi-stage retro-themed FPGA project. One colleague, 
a contractor who works for me, has taken upon himself to draft a cost 
estimate for the job. His estimates *do* include the engineering salaries, 
although his time estimates are too conservative and it's only the 1st phase 
of the project, but his bottom line was in the vicinity of AUD$120K.

It goes without saying that anyone who designs a 'Coco4' is simply going to 
have to donate their time. It is completely and utterly impossible to create 
a product in the volumes that this community will buy, and expect a return 
for your time. You'd be hard-pressed to break even on production costs, IMHO.

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"