Obsidian price point

[revansrevenge]

I am curious as to why the obsidian sound board costs 125.  While I love the hilt designs, this seems an obvious grift.  A modified Teensy 4.0 simply destroys this card, open source... what gives?  I am an EE don't snowball me.

[Cyclops942]

It costs that much because it does.  Crappy answer, from your perspective, but that’s the truth.  There are initial R&D costs, ongoing software support costs, materials costs, and probably lots more that I don’t know.  US has contracted with a vendor to supply these things, and that’s the cost that works out so that we can have them in our sabers.

I’m really sorry that I don’t have a better answer for you, but in the end, it boils down to the cost structure involved in the individual product and the overall cost structure for all products.  As customers, we do not have the right to see the internal workings or thought processes of how UltraSabers prices things.  We have the right to vote with our purchases if we don’t like the way things are, of course, but that’s like going to your mechanic and asking why they are charging you $500 for a frammistat when you can go to Parts-R-Us.com and get a frammistat for $230. 

[firehand10k]

You said yourself that other you mentioned is open source. That's great for people who know how to code and want to make all kinds of changes themselves.The Obsidian board is a preset almost plug-n-play solution with easy to use features and and a ready made software package to work with it. Many buyers want their sabers ready to go and  Obsidian provides that already.
I love soldering and tinkering and making my hardware changes but i have no interest at all in playing with a bunch of ones and zeros to make that hardware do what it should. Other people already been paid to do that bit when i buy Obsidian.