Tembra, his music downloaded. Darmok and Jalad with the AUX cable.
Nice project. $249 seems a bit high, but I guess it’s like the Fairphone, they can’t save as much as the large manufacturers do.
I’m genuinely curious if someone’s published a BoM cost breakdown, I’m wondering if there’s a couple of super high tickets items in the like the scroll wheel and custom PCB cost.
The cost of the scroll wheel cannot possibly be more than 10€ and the pcb cannot be more than 1€ battery is about 4e and display can be 7-8, chip is 2-3e and passives, connectors etc brlow 5. The manufacturing costs of the thing are likely below 40€, even in small volumes. Assy costs are probably about 20% of the total.
Part of the high cost may be investments in moulds for the casing and r&d cost.
It’s a project by an Australian team, so one would assume two things:
- It’s in Australian Dollars.
- Australia has experienced severe hyperinflation overnight (or earlier today, for many of us reading this)
The only source is the absolutely bonkers price – that’s why it’s an assumption.
In all seriousness, if I were to release open source hardware and software, I’d charge a price like that to ensure that my time would be reasonably compensated for what’s clearly going to involve small production batches of hand-built-in-the-first-world items.
Hopefully people take the source and release a full walkthrough on doing this with an entirely off-the-shelf design. I’ve got a full electronics workshop and two 3d printers and would LOVE to assemble my own music player with open source designs.
Brings back fond memories of rockbox on my sansa.
Rockbox was the shit.
Breathed so much life into my iRiver. And I always had to defend the thing: “it’s older than iPods! It can’t be an rip-off”
I use rockbox on a late ipod classic. I find it a very good listening experience, but I am interested in switching to open source *hardware
This is insanely priced, particularly when you see that it literally loses on everything but battery life compared to the original iPod 5gb, let alone the Classic.
Not quite. It has 1TB sd card storage. That’s far, far better. And it has wifi and USB not just FireWire. Ram is less sure but how much ram do you need for playing tunes?
Where did you read 1TB? The webpage says it supports up to 2TB but doesn’t say it ships with an SD card.
Aha, I did indeed miss the “external storage” row—mostly because it only uses the “Tb” acronym quite late in the description. I think the difference between Firewire and USB-C is minimal? (ie they are both “fast enough”) but I guess having wifi is a step up (although I always still plug my phone in to transfer music at this point so…)
