@shawn posted:All Malarky - Lol - I designed some board ms a few years ago for controls. Low volume didn’t even come near that price.
malar
I’ll try again. I don’t doubt you pieced together a design a few years ago for a control (of something). While your circuit board layout was undoubtedly custom, everything else was probably then-current chips and components that were wholesale/generic devices widely available to you and anyone else at the time. Your only design constraint was building something that worked for what you wanted it to do using parts that were widely and inexpensively available at the time you built your control. Even though it would be more expensive today than it was a few years ago due to chip shortages, you could absolutely still do so again. I’m certainly not arguing to the contrary.
That is completely different than having to produce ASICs and other custom parts for a board design that was frozen 30 years ago. Those devices simply don’t exist in their exact configurations “off the shelf” anywhere in the market at any price. Instead, the 30-year-old ASIC, processor, etc has to be retooled and custom built. Custom built circuit boards are not overly expensive, but custom built devices to populate them are (especially of ancient designs). My point is, building a custom control isn’t cost prohibitive, building it to a design that requires 30-year-old parts is.
Of course, Lionel (or anyone else - perhaps you given your experience with controls) could avoid the parts availability/obsolescence problem by completely redesigning the board to accommodate modern wholesale components (keeping the current form factor and pinouts, of course). However, that, too, has a design cost which I’m willing to assume exceeds what Lionel thought consumers would pay for a board to run a 20-30-year-old train.
