I was part of a team who build (one batch only of) a hardware IoT product that I'm _still_ really proud of. Our bill of materials was ~$70, maybe 50% or so of that on our cpu/microcontroller board (the kinda standard "RaspberryPi plus an Arduino" kind of design). By the time we failed to raise funding for a second production run and threw in thew towel (amongst internal infighting), we could have functionally replaced that with the at-the-time brand new ESP8266 (this was 2013/14) for a few dollars. But we already had (expensive) plastic injection moulds made up that fit our boards so we couldn't even switch our insides easily.
Hardware is hard. Major respect to anyone who get it right at small scales.
I was part of a team who build (one batch only of) a hardware IoT product that I'm _still_ really proud of. Our bill of materials was ~$70, maybe 50% or so of that on our cpu/microcontroller board (the kinda standard "RaspberryPi plus an Arduino" kind of design). By the time we failed to raise funding for a second production run and threw in thew towel (amongst internal infighting), we could have functionally replaced that with the at-the-time brand new ESP8266 (this was 2013/14) for a few dollars. But we already had (expensive) plastic injection moulds made up that fit our boards so we couldn't even switch our insides easily.
Hardware is hard. Major respect to anyone who get it right at small scales.