How to setup Wifi when boxed off the shelf product is sold?

General
21

@Hugo, I totally get your point and I knew it before already. Please check the filters on your inbox, you got a couple of my messages somewhere.

@lzerman, I wish to Hugo and all the guys @Electric Imp to reach the size of the companies you have named one day but they are a start-up and I know what this means, because I’ve started an half dozen of companies in the past 15 years.

A chip that sell for $2-3 in large quantities has a real manufacturing cost of few cents or less. The money you pay are for the R&D and not to pay the actual die. So it cost almost nothing to them to send some free sample and it’s cheaper to send it to anybody, from the big engineering company to the bedroom tinkerer, than pay salaries to human being dedicated to verify and select the candidates that should be worthy to receive freebees.

I can believe that, if Electric Imp had a plan for free samples, they were not going to sell anything, as most of the tinkerers just need one to enjoy and have a lot of fun and I’m pretty sure anybody was going to try to get it for free. Not really a business model that allows a new venture to survive then.

I imagine that William, responsible of the business development, has the authority and the stocks available to send samples to the manufacturers and the engineers with a real potential but I totally understand the position of the company.

I can understand that an imp002 it can be attractive to many, as it offers double of the GPIOs, pin out for the opto-electronics and even a connector for external antenna.

At the same time I know that it can be complicated to manipulate it, not easy to solder down and for sure it’s not plug&play like the imp001. Offer the product to the market will probably increase the requests of support, help and so on as well.

Plus the imp002 requires the subscription to the server api, that’s free for the developer edition, and I can imagine how complicated it can be to bill to any single client once a year the subscription fee, that’s so low to actually make the company loose money, if for example they have to charge a credit card and issue an invoice.

I think the solution is the one Hugo named here and in a dedicated post: the cooperation with distributors.

Dimitri

22

@Izerman: I can guarantee that every chip company has at least 10x (most likely 100x or more) the number of employees that we do right now. We have not sold imps direct to end users for about 6 months now - the overhead is just too large for onesie-twosie orders, which is why people like Sparkfun and Adafruit sell them these days. These outlets are not ideal for module-level products where you can’t get them to do anything at all without soldering and external circuitry.

Many vendors are already working with our preproduction modules but as I have said many times, they are not generally available. When we’ve worked out a distribution channel - and they’re in full production - they will be.

23

Not for a moment were we asking from free samples. If you knew our background, (which of course you do not) you would know there are few people on this planet who appreciate the difficulties of either starting a new company or working in the constraints of a start-up. I am in the midst of starting one right now, outside the current industry that we currently work in.

onesie-twosie orders
Been there, done that. These can be a time killer with minimal ROI.

Many vendors are already working with our preproduction modules
Yes, they had to get them some how. Did they buy 1000 on a real? Is that what it takes?

My statements in the tread above are meant to be more helpful and share our experience in many years of this market place than they are to be received as critical. They are not. I applauded EI’s efforts and visionary product. Unlike some of the posts and reviews elsewhere, “We get it”. Because we get it, our enthusiasm maybe misconstrued.

But the reality is that we cannot designed a product or even a board without the chips that are to be used. Designing with the SD card will not get us anywhere where we need to go. It is that what we need to do is just too early for EI and we have to go with OTS parts such as PIC’s and Microchip Wifi. This is sad since it appears that EI has a better solution at a better price for what we need to do, and our timeline can not wait too long. That is the frustration you are reading.

I am going to have my son do a small personal project with the SD card, but this does not address our business and clients needs today.

24

The vendors working with preproduction modules are the ones who have been talking to us directly. The module features were in part shaped by these customers.

If you contact manufacturer@electricimp.com then we can discuss options. I can guarantee you you’ll be able to get modules before you’ll be able to write an equivalent software stack for a microchip wifi module :slight_smile: