Highly Anticipated 32-bit "Due" due When?

Here is the current pricing on the USA version of the site.

1: 	$48.95 	
10: 	$47.63 	
100: 	$46.81

It seems you can't get away from where you are, the link redirects me to au.mouser.com with these AUD prices

$66.08
$64.30
$63.19

$39 shipping
$105.08 total

Yikes!

Unfortunately I won't be getting one any time soon at that price :frowning:


Rob

@GRAYnomad

Is there a way to get around the price problem by having someone from the USA buy then ship to you or is it just the way the currencies work out? I am thinking it probably won't help but, it is a thought.

According to Google...
48.95 US dollars = 47.3221 Australian dollars
66.08 AUD = 68.3664 USD

If I buy them at 48.95, fly to Australia, sell them at 66.08, I would get 19.4164 (USD) per board. Hmm. What's the carry-on limit? 50 pounds? I wonder how many boards that is?

48.95 US dollars = 37.7322 euros
40.36 EUR = 52.3510 USD

Not as lucrative but it may pay for the plane ticket.

or is it just the way the currencies work out?

The AUS has been higher than the USD for a long time, so they should be cheaper here, not ~30% more :0

We normally get the "we have to ship them all the way to Australia" BS line but it's just as far from Italy to the US as it is to Aus. Heck I reckon Mouser is such a large customer UPS/Fedex almost pay them to do the shipping.

Is there a way to get around the price problem by having someone from the USA buy then ship to you

That would work, we'll see how things are after the dust settles. I've got some LPC code I wouldn't mind porting across, but it's not a priority at this point and I have other things to work on.


Rob

50 pounds? I wonder how many boards that is?

A lot, let me know the flight # and I'll meet you at the airport :0


Rob

I don't know about you guys, but after reading the stuff in the Due forum and elsewhere on the internet, I'm very disappointed by the new Due. No ethernet header, no RTC support yet, only 2 IRQs... I know this will be added soon but it sounds to me like it was still released too soon. There is already talk of future boards with additional hardware features (like ethernet) being released. I have cancelled my order and will continue to use the Uno and Mega for a while. Mostly because I have 20 or so shields I built or purchased that won't work with the Due without level translators (what a pain).

Bill

Bajdi:
That link redirects me to mouser.be, price there is €40.36. And that is without tax, so I must add another 21% + shipping.

It takes me to uk.mouser.com and gives me content in English and prices in Euro (40,38 €) but with the French-style decmal separator ("," rather than ".") :astonished: so think it is storing language and currency preferences in cookies.

Welcome to the world of "geographical restriction" pricing. Yes, it seems the rest of the world is indeed getting "special" pricing from Mouser (and an increasing number of other retailers are starting to do this too, apparently), which has nothing to do with exchange rates, it is simply opportunistic pricing (we will charge in each market what we think we can get away with).

One way to get around the websites picking up your country from your IP address is to use a VPN with servers in the US (if that's the location you want them to think you are coming in from.) Your next challenge will be to see if you can get them to ship outside the US if you use the US website to purchase from. If not, you may need to use a postal forwarding service, or get a friend in the US to forward it on.

Sucks, but that's the price you pay for not being smart enough to be born an 'mercan. Good luck.

But don't feel too bad. It looks like Mouser felt the 'mercans were getting too a good a deal, and so have put their prices up too (considerably! $36.49 -> $48.95 > 34% increase!) I wonder if the original $36.49 was simply a pricing error, or whether it has been "suggested" to them by the suppliers (i.e., Arduino) that they fall in line and stick closer to the list price, at least while the launch is underway.

I'd kill myself before paying the au.mouser.com prices, though. Someone at mouser must have had a bad shrimp off the barbie, or got bitten by a rabid koala bear or something.

Edit: Interesting link

Graynomad:
Unfortunately I won't be getting one any time soon at that price :frowning:

Well, to tell you the truth, I think even the US retail list of $49 is a bit overpriced, given the competition. You can buy a Teensy 3.0 from Paul for $19. PJRC Store (I don't know what the pricing is on au.pjrc.com is, though, LOL!) I suspect though that once the official launch is over the original Mouser pricing for the Due of ~$36 will become more like the normal street price. So I think patience will be rewarded. Either that, or you will have to be willing to pay a premium for the privilege of being a pioneer (you know, one of the guys with the arrows sticking out of his back...) :grin:

Yeah, but you'll have to get through the Arduino sniffer dogs at the airport. Maybe wrap them in bags of coke to put them off the scent?

Maybe wrap them in bags of coke to put them off the scent?

Would Pepsi work?


Rob

Graynomad:
Would Pepsi work?

Well, 8 out of 10 coke sniffer dogs said they preferred Pepsi after taking the Taste Challenge, so I don't see why not.

I have mixed feelings on the Due price.

As a customer, of course I want the lowest price I can get. When I saw Mouser had a low price, I immediately ordered 2 pieces. I didn't know if it was a promotional price or just a mistake. Since Tim (a.k.a. "MOUSER_EMBEDDED") posted the link to Mouser's order page, and Tim appears to a salesman from Mouser who has never contributed meaningfully to any conversation, I didn't feel too bad about taking advantage of the low price. I see it's now $48.95.

As someone who makes arduino-compatible boards, I actually think $49 is probably a pretty reasonable price for Arduino Due. First of all, they're making the boards in Italy, not China, and they're doing things like zero carbon footprint. At substantial volume, those aren't horribly expensive, but it's also a choice that locks out the absolute lowest possible cost production. Second, Due has a high-end ARM microcontroller and a LOT of parts on the board, plus a fairly large PCB built with a mix of surface mount and through hole parts. Looking over the schematic, they clearly went for a reliable, low-risk design rather then trying to optimize for low cost. For example, the 74LVC1G125 buffer between the 16U2 and the SAM3X could probably have been a couple resistors. Third, they are spending pretty substantially on engineering and also community building projects. Fourth, there is "healthy" profit margin for their resellers.

When the inevitable cheap Asian clones appear, it's a pretty safe bet they won't be incurring those costs. Well they'll probably incur #2, since they'll likely just copy the design verbatim, not even making the simplest of cost reductions like replacing that '125 buffer with a couple resistors. But they'll be using the cheapest/dirtiest Asian fabs, not spending anything on engineering or community (and they'll send all their customers to Arduino's community for support), and probably selling direct on ebay. Even then, Due isn't an inherently low-cost design, so I don't think we're going to see really cheap clones.

The SAM3X8E (sans errata) is a really amazing part. A built-in 480 Mbit/sec USB PHY is something very few other chips have (but how fast is really runs with software overhead remains to be seen). The SAM3X has a large flash memory and a pretty substantial amount of on-chip RAM. It's Atmel's largest, most expensive SAM3 part.

Then again, as a customer, the $35 + SD card price of Raspberry Pi is pretty appealing. Speaking only for myself, I would be hesitant to make any new hobbyist-oriented board that sells for more that $35.... but then I don't have a tremendous brand like "Arduino".

The SAM3X8E (sans errata) is a really amazing part.

Yeah, it has a lot of neat features many of which aren't implemented on the Due.

Massimo alluded to more boards coming out, I think they could produce a "pro" version or something with all the goodies on board.


Rob

Its interesting that criticism is focussed on price. To me, the Due price (in Europe, which includes 20% sales tax) is fair. I think the strongest competetion is from boards that offer more capability (but are also more expensive).

For example Cubieboard, at US$49, has much higher computation capability and decent graphics (yes, its not a real time board, and it has an OS):

1G ARM cortex-A8 processor, NEON, VFPv3, 256KB L2 cache
Mali400, OpenGL ES GPU
512M/1GB DDR3 @480MHz
HDMI 1080p Output
10/100M Ethernet
4Gb Nand Flash
2 USB Host, 1 micro SD slot, 1 SATA, 1 ir
96 extend pin including I2C, SPI, RGB/LVDS, CSI/TS, FM-IN, ADC, CVBS, VGA, SPDIF-OUT, R-TP..
Running Android, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions

or looking more at embedded solutions, the ArduCopter community (which started with a Mega2560 clone and then moved upwards in compute power and integrated sensors) seem to see the main benefit to them of the Due launch in terms of the multi-architecture 1.5 IDE. The actual Due hardware is cheaper but less capable than what they are focussed on, such as the VBrain (highe compute power with floating point unit, integrated sensors) at EUR 199:

168Mhz ARM CortexM4F microcontroller with DSP and floating-point hardware acceleration.
1024KiB of flash memory, 192KiB of RAM.
MEMS accelerometer and gyro, magnetometer and barometric pressure sensor.
8 RC Input standard PPM , PPMSUM , SBUS
8 RC Output at 490 hz
1 integrated high speed data flash for logging data
1 Can bus 2 i2c Bus
3 Serial port available one for GPS 1 for serial option 1 for serial telemetry.
3 digital switch (ULN2003).
Jtag support for onboard realtime debugger.
1 Buzzer output.
1 Input for control lipo voltage

or the DIY Drones PX4 (higher compute capability, FPU, integrated sensors incl. GPS) at USD 149:

  • ARM Cortex-M4F microcontroller running at 168MHz with DSP and floating-point hardware acceleration.
  • 1024KiB of flash memory, 192KiB of RAM.
  • MEMS accelerometer and gyro, magnetometer and barometric pressure sensor.
  • Flexible expansion bus and onboard power options.

For the small, light and inexpensive ARM project the Teensy 3.0 looks great. For the larger, more compute intensive (e.g. audio processing) projects, I wish there was something more like these Arducopter/UAV boards, retaining the good compute capability especially the FPU, but dropping the airborne-oriented sensor package. I would have thought that not including GPS, magnetometer, 3-d accelerometer, gyro and barometric pressure sensors would drop 50 to 75 USD off the base package. Soething like that in Mega/Due style board layout would be very attractive (and yes, it would be around 80 to 100 USD).

Then again, as a customer, the $35 + SD card price of Raspberry Pi is pretty appealing.

The price of the Pi is a bit like stone soup. Sounds cheap but not when you add it up.

You have to add keyboard, mouse, SD card, power supply and an HD TV, before you get a working system and then it is Linux which totally cripples it from the point of view of real time control.

Add to that a USB port that doesn't work quite how it should (you can't get a USB camera working) and it is not so much of a bargain.

It has however just been upgraded to 512MB of RAM, as it can only run code out of RAM, this is the same as the Due (well a bit less because Linux has to run there as well)

The BeagleBone is quite nice. More expensive than the RasPi but much more capable, and it could be argued that it's better value than the Due. I've got one, with a prototyping cape (Bone capes are like Arduino shields). There are lots of capes available now.

and it could be argued that it's better value than the Due.

It depends entirely what you want to do with it.
Basically the BeagleBone is a Linux box with all the baggage that involves - no real time operation your thread can be stopped at any time. Therefore no multiplexing, software PWM, no uninterrupted A/D and D/A conversion for simple sound recording / generation, no exact timing of pulses, no driving stepping motors or servos.