during last year the price BeagleBone Black has risen for about EUR 20. It started at a bit more than EUR 40 and now has arrived at EUR 60,00 (and above). Amazingly the price became higher the more hardware has been in stock of the suppliers.
Now I see the same for the BeagleBone Green, it started at EUR 42 and already has arrived at EUR 50 at some suppliers.
So…what is the reason for this? Are there any expensive components on the board which pull up the price that massive?
As to the BeagleBone Black, we have not increased our prices to the distributors for a very long time. What you may be seeing is people buying boards from distributors and then reselling them with an additional markup. We have a MSRP, but that is only a MSRP. We can’t control what the distributors charge.
Schematics are available online. Are those sufficient to build your own?
I was checking on Arduino resources and got Paperduino (http://paperduino.eu/doku.php) envy It should be possible to build your own Beagle, shouldn’t it?
It’ll be a minimum 6 layer board with multiple rev’s to work out the kinks. Probably around $500 a pop. And lot’s of time spent getting high speed signal traces put down correctly, dense BGA signal routing, dealing with distributors and inventory, spec’ing parts, populating the board with 0402 or 0603 parts by hand, etc. It’s fun for some people like me, but I wouldn’t recommend it for most.