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Comment by davekeck | Hacker News Reader

Sure! Checking the invoice, I paid $2205 (including anodizing and shipping) to make 125 enclosures (which includes 125x enclosures, backplates, and buttons).

So that works out to $18 per unit. This is my first time doing something like this so I have no idea if that's a good deal or not.

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Reasonable. I find anodizers are easy to find, good ones hard, and great ones almost impossible. I found a great one in Auburn and I feel lucky I did.

Iirc you’re paying for the batch. If you pick a color they don’t do a lot, you’re paying the same for 1pc or 2000. The dye and handling is pretty much the same.

Interesting! I had the same experience with anodization, the quality between manufacturers varied a lot.

So it sounds like you use different companies for machining and anodizing? It certainly seems like you'd get better results from someone that specializes in each...

absolutely. I don't know if your camera body would allow it, but if you can get a die and extrusion, buying two or three tons of near net shape extrusion that you do a machine pass on, pass to anodizing, and assemble might reduce your cogs. Friend's COGS was cut by 2/3 switching from raw stock to custom extrusion.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cwandt/55-66-88-by-cwan... My buddies have some good horror stories trying to get metal parts tumbled and anodized. You do have to nail down quality standards beforehand, and even then they may just give up and ship back to you, or disappear.

$200 is a very fair price given the capabilities and novelty – since you're at it, would love to hear your BOM cost too!

IIRC all the chips were about $100 per unit, but of course that depended on the quantity that I was building (~120). When I looked at it briefly, it looked like I might be able to get the BOM price down to $50-70/unit if I made 1k-10k units.

There was a ton of manual assembly for each unit (some due to my errors, some due to the PCBA's errors, some simply due to the design of the device). All in all, it's not get-rich-quick/ever scheme haha.

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