So we finally managed to fill our open positions for the PICxie beta! Now we can finally focus on the actual beta rather than recruiting for it. We’ve ordered all of the parts and just as we calculated there was a 20% reduction in production costs. This recent data shows that we might be able to sell these for $44.99! Possibly even $39.99!! Something we are striving to achieve for you guys, we want PICxie to be a very accessible platform. We need 2 things to make that happen:

Demand/Volume

We need enough people to buy PICxies to reduce the costs of components, cables, and LiPo batteries. The batteries in particular cost us ~$2.00, but if we had a demand of 50-100 units we could order in bulk and get these for ¼ the price. At that demand the cost for components drops by about 50% as well.

Equipment

We really need a 3D printer in-house. We’ve already settled on the Form1+ (Possibly Form2) because it will have no issue printing the cube case that PICxie uses. The problem is we cannot afford to buy one based on our budget. Currently we spend ~$10 on each case, however with a 3D printer this would drop to 1/10th of the cost.

We can solve both of these issues rather elegantly with crowdfunding. Additionally this would generate PR which is ALWAYS good. We will be doing another Kickstarter, we like Kickstarter because it’s low risk to you guys financially, and well respected as a platform. We know exactly how much we need to raise in order to A) Fulfill rewards and B) Get the equipment we need to drive the cost even lower! We’ll post more about our Kickstarter after the beta units have been sent out.