[HH] the missing security camera revolution

[Tom Metro]

Drew Van Zandt wrote:
> If you are not factoring in the cost of...I recommend you stay far
> away from actually trying this.

To clarify, I wasn't expressing an interest in starting a business to
produce such devices, and therefore haven't made any attempt to look at
the production costs. I have had some experience with that, but here I
was using a very broad rule of thumb for electronic devices that suggest
a retail price will fall somewhere in the range of 2 to 4 times the
parts cost. And I was using the retail price of a cell phone with
comparable hardware as a benchmark. As you point out, if the production
volume is off by orders of magnitude between the compared products, then
the derived numbers will be way off.

The point of my question was not to see whether I could produce a device
myself hitting these price targets, but to understand if there was a
good reason why the existing players in this space haven't taken
advantage of the latest tech to deliver something as capable as I
described for close to the price point I mentioned.


> What yearly volume are you looking at? Under 10k units, an $80
> production cost device should sell for $250 - $500 if you want to
> actually be able to have a company that can support it. BOM and
> production costs are generally not the major contributors to the sale
> price of low-volume devices.

You have a good point on the matter of volume. I have no idea what sort
of volume these security cameras typically sell in. 10K might be
consider a big seller, or a niche product. No doubt that also varies
depending on whether you are looking at sub-$200 consumer aimed devices,
or $300+ pro devices.


> If you are not factoring in the cost of R&D, salaries, support,
> certification, ... insurance ...

Salaries? support? certification? We're likely talking about a Chinese
manufacturer, so those hardly apply. :-)

(Of course even if pretty much all the cameras are made in China, at
least the better known brands have US-based sales and support operations.)


>     They found that if they assumed a barely-living wage for one person
>     living in Somerville, and if that person worked 10 hour days with
>     the printer running 24/7...they'd have to charge $15 per cubic inch
>     of material just to break even.

Nice to see the students had the foresight to do the analysis.

So did they adjust their business plan to account for the fact that the
annual salary of one operator ($25K to $30K?) dwarfs the cost of a $2K,
slow, low-bandwidth 3D printer?

Not to mention that the operator would be spending the majority of their
time sitting around reading a book or something. (Unless the rest of
their time was spent on business overhead activities.)

It may still be a viable model if they scaled up to run dozens of
printers in parallel.

I saw a video (probably on the Make Magazine YouTube channel) about an
organization (I don't recall if it was for profit) that crowdsourced the
fabrication of 3D parts. The first demo project they built was a replica
of a large marble bust that was 3D scanned, sliced up into something
like 120 parts, and distributed to the individual 3D printer operators
who fabricated their designated part, then sent it in to the leader who
assembled the completed product. (The demo used random filament colors
for each part so you could easily see all the pieces that went into the
finished product.)

 -Tom