Originally posted by: Modelworks
I really hate how companies price development kits like they are made of gold. That only serves to kill the hobbyist market.
QFT.
I can understand if some of the premium features & support models are several hundred or several thousand dollars if they're the kind of thing that they'll only ever sell a few dozen / few hundred of and they're extremely specialty items backed up by a lot of engineering support, especially if they use hundreds of dollars worth of high end components on them.
I can't understand why the run of the mill typical development boards are often $300-$1000+ even when they've got extremely little hardware complexity (often just a single microprocessor with 8-44 pins and a very few glue components), use low cost readily available parts, and have markets measured in the thousands / tens of thousands of units for educational, hobby, light commercial, et. al. uses.
I also find it highly disappointing how the chip manufacturers and development board designers have seemingly often lost all 'vision' as to what makes a *useful*, *interesting*, *clever*, and *well designed* product. So many of the development boards use really quite powerful microcontroller chips and yet for lack of even the most basic design considerations of the dev. board they often make about 90% of those features totally inaccessible (as in the pins aren't even fully connected / exposed for user access) or at least highly useless in practice (as in you'd need to PCB fabricate / wire wrap a HUGELY difficult / complex interface board JUST to make even the most shoddy / questionably useful interface to the signals that ARE exposed on some very poorly chosen types of high density / 'weird' / hard to find / hard to use connectors on the development board).
Often they lack basic things like:
* a power regulator & supply voltage pads/connections to power a few extra interface / analog / level converter chips that will be needed in a huge percentage of dev. board uses.
* easy to access / well documented test points so you can actually check it out with a meter/scope/...
* connectors that actually have signals grouped in any kind of logical / easy fashion
* op-amps / buffers available for ADC / DAC / PWM type ports.
* basic ADC/DAC units on the I2S / I2C / SPI ports if there aren't some built into the uC IC.
* reset or power switches
* some easy way to attach daughter boards or perf boards or a wire wrap area for custom interfacing
* anything more useful than a couple of push buttons and a few LEDs; sorry I didn't just buy an ARM7 / ARM9 to detect when I push a button and make a few LEDs light. How about some USEFUL interface ports on the thing that would be relatively realistic for real world needs -- USB, serial port, parallel port, ethernet, JTAG, H-bridge outputs, amplified speaker, some reasonable ADC/DAC ports with op-amps, ....
etc. etc.
Heck design a decently well implemented thought out dev. board and maybe they could even sell it as an application solution board for something like basic data acquisition, motor control, educational / class project use, et. al. As it is the time / money you spend messing with a lot of these dev. boards would be better invested in doing a custom design / layout PCB for a dev. board that actually has useful real world interfaces since you'll never really be able to get the normal dev. board interfaced to a real interesting project or you'd never be able to afford several units so you could contemplate using them for either projects or teaching or whatever.
I've done it before and it still took me a couple of days last week to get them straightened out for a new project.
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