How Much ?

Hi,
I have a project in the Audio forum where I used the following cheap keyboard to drive an Arduino Synth.

How cheap - 2 Dollars 68 cents for 72 membrane buttons, A microcontroller, a speaker an LM386 Amplifier and a few other bits and bobs.

How its possible to produce something usable this cheaply is beyond me -

Duane B

rcarduino.blogspot.com

Perhaps they were churning out so many in the heydays, that they have a brickhouse full of them stored up, that they need to move.....?

We see that here in the US sometimes. I buyer might buy up surplus or obsolete stock from an original manufacture for pennies on the dollar and offer them to the general public for dimes on the dollar. The problem is that once the stock is sold it will most likely not be available ever again at any price, so that is not a safe way to procure parts for a commercial company where you have be think about future availability of the parts used in commercial offering, but is a great way for a hobbyist to procure stuff.

Lefty

once the stock is sold it will most likely not be available ever again at any price,

Your saying I have a priceless collectors piece ! Damn I already ruined it with Arduino.

I am not too sure about the end of line pricing though, I think stuff really is this cheap -

The 1.8 Dollar model

To the range topping MS-016 at almost 5 dollars -

Duane B

Did you notice the minimum order quantity is 500?
Best regards
Jantje

The ones I don't get at all are the components on ebay that you can get with free shipping. Yesterday, I bought twenty (two lots of ten) one-watt LED's for a grand total of one dollar and fifty cents INCLUDING SHIPPING. Sure, they take a month to arrive, but I get this type of stuff to shelve and pull out when there is something I want to do with it. There is NO way this company isn't taking a loss on every sale, yet they have (and will) run these kind of sales for months at a time-- this wasn't that much of a fluke in pricing, I maybe saved fifty to sixty cents over what I would normally pay-- meaning about $1.25 for ten one watt LED's. Shipped. From China.

focalist:
The ones I don't get at all are the components on ebay that you can get with free shipping. Yesterday, I bought twenty (two lots of ten) one-watt LED's for a grand total of one dollar and fifty cents INCLUDING SHIPPING. Sure, they take a month to arrive, but I get this type of stuff to shelve and pull out when there is something I want to do with it. There is NO way this company isn't taking a loss on every sale, yet they have (and will) run these kind of sales for months at a time-- this wasn't that much of a fluke in pricing, I maybe saved fifty to sixty cents over what I would normally pay-- meaning about $1.25 for ten one watt LED's. Shipped. From China.

I thought of that also when I started buying electronics parts from China on E-bay. I've come to the conclusion that the Chinese government must be somehow subsidizing the shipping costs, either by tax deductions or other methods to somehow make the shipping 'free' to the seller. How else could they do that? And it's not just a few of the Chinese E-bay sellers, but rather the majority of them selling inexpensive electronics parts. I get my stuff in 10-11 days constantly, and always seem to have to sign for delivery.

Lefty

Most of these shipped from China stuff came from Hongkong, a free port. There is a lot of tax in international shipping that I don't know about. Actually cost to move stuff across oceans is probably very cheap.