Here I want to give you an Idea – of how much the production of 50 OggStreamers costs.
The following calculation still leaves the following costs:
- NRE costs for soilder stencils
- NRE costs for programming of the pick’n’place machine
- machining of the case
- laser-engraving the case
- THT soldering
- Final assembly
all prices in EUR (without taxes)
| PCB | 550 |
| Special SMD-Parts | 1650 |
| Pick’N’Place + Standard SMD-Parts | 2400 |
| THT Parts | 1150 |
| Linux-Module (XportPro) |
2200 |
| Sum | 7950 |
thats roughly 200 Euros per Device (as a conservative Estimation) – a more realistic Estimation would conclude with apprx. 160 Euros per Deivce. – remember these are not the final production costs, because this calculation leaves out the above mentioned points.
The OggStreamer-Device started as a Hobby-project and evolved over time – it is an ongoing Experiment so to say – and it was never cost optimized. All our design decisions were carried out the way that we wanted it to be – we didn’t waste a thought about the economic feasibility of this project. 🙂 So it is kind of miraculous that we have come that far in this process. A pilot run of 12 devices was accomplished with the generous support of many friendly people and our supporters. And there is more to come we recently secured the sponsorship for the production of 50+ devices from the “Internet Foundation Austria” – who acknowledged the value of this Project and OpenHardware in general. The OggStreamer is now part of the “NetIdee 2012” sponsored projects.
OggStreamer 
I think nowadays it would be much easier and cheaper to make a similar performing device out of RaspberryPi.
I agree with you to some certain extend – I also thought about building the device around the RPI – but there are some argumente against this – with the RPI the breakout of the connectors is predetermined – making it hard to design the Product around it. (look at the cases desigend for RPI) – Second for Audio-In and the UserInterface you would need a separate PCB which also adds up costs – Overall the Design would be only a little cheaper if designed around the RPI (which costs 35 Euro) + I2S Codec – versus 43,5 of the XPortPro (when bought in 50+ quantities) + AudioDSP VS1063.
What would be a really great for the Open Hardware Community, would be small affordable and standardized(!) – Linuxmodules – something like SO-DIMM, or EMOA-68 (http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture/EOMA-68) – I also like the way Olimex is going with their OpenHardware Linuxboards – maybe they will come up in future with a easy to integrate Linux-Module (+ ehternet) https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/
For the Hardware-Hacker who wants to build one single Unit – the Raspberry-PI way is definitly an interessting route to take.
For an input audio interface it would be cheaper to use a ready made USB adapter. They can be extremely cheap, less than 10 euro per device, and provide reasonable dynamic range. Nevertheless I find using STM8 for this project very appealing 🙂
hi,
why you don’t just switch the XPortPro by a Carambola 2 module…it is only 19€, and this will drop down the total cost, in the end you will have a lot of more options like wi-fi, or two usp ports, or two or more ethernet ports…including two of them gigabit 😉 ??
http://8devices.com/carambola-2
regards
hi – thats a great Idea – I also thought about this recently – maybe the 400 Mhz MIPS CPU has enough power to encode OPUS on the fly (as there exist a fix-point only OPUS Encoder, which is not the case for Vorbis) – That would probably also eliminate the need for the AudioDSP – as a small I2S Codec would be sufficient. Also wi-fi and USB-Ports are a great benefit. For a possible redesign this is one of the top candidates.