Shumate's announcement
Rick Sparber
“Now, we are pleased to announce the DRO-550 which will give newcomers all of the features of the DPU-550 at a cost point well below that of a plain DRO-350! That even includes a near fully assembled board so tedious soldering is now a thing of the past. The DRO-550 should be available for purchase by the end of the year so you will probably want to hold off buying a DRO-350 until then.“
Interesting move on Shumate’s part. Lester, I hope you don’t have a lot of DRO-350’s in stock since it sounds like he will be undercutting them with his new DRO. It also seems to me that he is abandoning those that own the DRO-350 and want to upgrade to the 550 (Full), if there are any that wish to go this route.
Anyone want to bet that his new DRO uses an LCD and looks a lot like a certain prototype we saw recently….
What I find a bit odd is that it seems like he has saturated the market with the 350. A very few owners bought the 550 (Lite) and not enough showed interest in the 550 (Full) to justify a production run. So who is going to buy an entirely new DRO? I doubt the owners of the 350 will just toss theirs.
I also see that Shumate still can’t figure out how to name things. The DRO-350 upgraded with the 550 used to be called the DRO-550. Now he is reusing this name for an entirely different piece of hardware. That sure confuses me!
Rick
Bruce Fairman
Rick Sparber
Bruce,
Yes, I think you probably did force his hand with your LCD prototype.
Clearly Shumate has no plan. First he screws the suppliers and plans to sell direct. Then he realizes the value of suppliers and wants them back. Same waffling over the 350.
If Shumate fails to get enough interest for his DRO-550 (new board, not the upgraded 350), why would you want to make a new one that would probably cost about the same?
I know it would not be nearly as much fun to do, but as you can see, I’m lobbying for the PIC solution. The selling point would be a far better human/machine interface, scale compatibility, and, if room, more features from the 550 feature set or maybe from other DROs. We do have a collection of potential features in our wish list.
I believe that Shumate did a good job on the 350 software given his limited space but went off the rails with the upgrade. Yet I would not want to just clone the 350 because we can do it far better, giving the user a lot more data before they begin to make chips.
Rick
From: Bruce Fairman
[mailto:b...@phlogiston.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 8:10 AM
To: opendro-u...@googlegroups.com
Cc: Lawrence W. Gill; Rick Sparber; Lester Caine
Subject: Re: Shumate's announcement
Rick, this explains a lot of Scott's behavior. he must have had his business plans threatened by my lcd prototype work. his bs about "bad for the group" was really "bad for Scott Shumate". it will be interesting what he actually does with this development. my lcd work clearly demonstrated that the lcd is cheaper with the parts that i found. the current hardware design ties the keypad and display together, so the keyboard will also be up for grabs. i also noticed that the store at shumatech.com is no longer operational. that makes sense.
the reason to upgrade a 350 is new features that have value, that means software since more scales are not a biggy. if the only advantage of a new design is lower cost, i don't think it will be much more that a replacement for existing purchases.
so, this may be an opportunity for non shumatech sellers like Les. upgrades that have new features that answer a market demand will continue to be viable. of course, marketing at shumatech is Scott's opinion, and the current upgrade fiasco is a good indicator of the validity of that opinion. and it will be interesting to see if he delivers on time. the end of the year is real soon now.
naming confusion is just another sign of a lack of awareness of the user.
the other possibility is to develop a competing platform for the opendro software. i think i am well on the way to doing that.
bruce
On 2009 Nov, 17, at 17:32, Rick Sparber wrote:
“Now, we are pleased to announce the DRO-550 which will give newcomers all of the features of the DPU-550 at a cost point well below that of a plain DRO-350! That even includes a near fully assembled board so tedious soldering is now a thing of the past. The DRO-550 should be available for purchase by the end of the year so you will probably want to hold off buying a DRO-350 until then.“
Interesting move on Shumate’s part. Lester, I hope you don’t have a lot of DRO-350’s in stock since it sounds like he will be undercutting them with his new DRO. It also seems to me that he is abandoning those that own the DRO-350 and want to upgrade to the 550 (Full), if there are any that wish to go this route.
Anyone want to bet that his new DRO uses an LCD and looks a lot like a certain prototype we saw recently….
What I find a bit odd is that it seems like he has saturated the market with the 350. A very few owners bought the 550 (Lite) and not enough showed interest in the 550 (Full) to justify a production run. So who is going to buy an entirely new DRO? I doubt the owners of the 350 will just toss theirs.
I also see that Shumate still can’t figure out how to name things. The DRO-350 upgraded with the 550 used to be called the DRO-550. Now he is reusing this name for an entirely different piece of hardware. That sure confuses me!
Rick
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Bruce Fairman
Rick Sparber
Bruce,
Wow, that would be a major blunder. I thought he was going with a true alpha numeric display however I understand that would require a major redesign of the display/keyboard circuit. If all he is going to do is repackage the existing hardware, why would anyone with a working 350 want to buy it. Clearly it would be cheaper to go with the upgrade. Externally, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.
=
Bruce Fairman
The main goal of the DRO-550 board is to fit the DRO-350 form-factor so that
existing enclosures and overlays can be reused. This allows one to replace
the DRO-350 with a DRO-550 in case anything ever happens to the DRO-350 and
not have to buy anything other than the board. Since the DRO-550 has spare
pins, one thing we could do is add an external LCD character display on top
of the DRO for tach, tool, and other information.
If I were to rearrange things, I would probably just do a four axis DRO with
eight digits and an LCD display above the keypad. Or possibly even a
completely graphical LCD. Maybe some day...