Visualizing Electronics Manufacturing Price Variation with Volume and Lead Time

Google Android Things developers announced a production hardware sample based on Intel Edison module:

Android Things is focused on helping developers build production ready devices that they can bring to market. This means building custom hardware in addition to the app software running on the Android Things system-on-module (SoM).

As a part of this effort we have released Edison Candle, the first in a series of production samples designed to showcase hardware and software designed to work together. The code is hosted on GitHub and the hardware design files are on CircuitHub.

That’s what the Edison Candle looks like.
It’s just demo hardware to show how to build a product with a system-on-module (Intel Edison) for Android Things with everything released in Github. You can also purchase the board on CircuitHub, but then I saw the price was around $356 for such a simple board (without Edison).

That’s quite a lot for a single board, clicking on “quote breakdown” showed the following:

As expected, manufacturing just one PCB can be expensive, but we can play with the sliders on CircuitHub page to adjust quantity and lead time to see how to it affects the price. Those are the default settings with one PCB, and 17 week days lead time.

Let’s say we only need one board, but we don’t have 17 days, it needs to be ready within 4 days. The price then jumps to $1,353.15. Now let’s say, we want to order 10,000 boards, and we are in no rush, with a 31 days lead time, the price per board drops to $4.7355.

You can play with the sliders to adjust quantity and lead time, and see how it affects unit pricing. The most surprising part was the effect of leadtime, as even just one day difference can make a massive different in price.

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