Quote Originally Posted by mattgajkowski View Post
...We'll be doing an AMA on Reddit during the campaign, where we'll be happy to geek out on all the details, but the tl;dr version is that USB wasn't as cheap as you'd think, and WiFi chips have gotten much less expensive than you'd think.
That is simply not true. If you are getting 802.11x chips for under a penny each, it is still more expensive than USB.USB just requires having a portion of your PCB used for a card edge connector, and using some of the processing of your MCU to bit bang USB. Thus it costs the board area for the card edge connection, nothing more. If you chose a reasonable multi core MCU you can get the USB bit bang software with a MIT license (thus no restrictions).The MCU to use would be a Parallax Propeller P8X32A, as it is an 8 core MCU that does have a good MIT licensed USB stack that uses bit banging already available (the USB does take 2 cores, that still leaves you 6 to work with), and it is the easiest to work with for programming the control firmware, it is 32 bit, and it is nearly as low cost as a much more limited AVR 8-Bit MCU.So do not try to sell that WiFi was a low cost solution, or that USB costs more than we would think. I have worked with USB on the P8X32A, so I know better.