Off The Shelf (OTS) vs. Custom Hardware Design
As a company focussed on customer satisfaction and developing long-term relationships, we will always aim to deliver hardware to the right specification, cost and timescale. In fact, we excel in this and will work with you to evaluate whether an OTS option is a viable alternative.
The SanCloud BeagleBone® Enhanced Single Board Computer (SBC) is used as an OTS product for 1000s of embedded and IoT applications. With each application, the BeagleBone® Enhanced is the perfect market-ready development platform. It is a feature-rich SBC, offers readily available open hardware and a proven, widely used ecosystem of device drivers. It also comes with the full support of SanCloud and the wider BeagleBoard® community. All these factors lead to a rapid development cycle for a working proof of concept.
As an inexpensive SBC, customers may choose to buy and take the SanCloud BeagleBone® Enhanced to market in its OTS state with no or little modification. Therefore time-to-market is quick too. However, in the case of larger volume orders, depending upon the required specification, this may not be the most cost-effective approach. Custom hardware in high volume production may deliver significantly lower production costs and an earlier return on investment against the non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs. In this instance, SanCloud works with its customers to add, modify or remove one or several features or develop a board on a completely new form factor.