The project needs it’s requirements specified.  This is the process of deciding on which features are required, which are important and which are nice to have.  It is usually best to start at the general form and features, then move progressively to the specific details.  Generally cost or market price are considered at this step.

For the design of this universal programmer, I feel that a market target price should be around $50 US.  This is not a hard requirement.  If the price reaches $100 US, I feel too many hobbyists will not be able to justify the cost of purchase.  A common industry standard for cost pricing is market price should be 2.5 times bill of materials (BOM) cost for direct to customer sales and 3.5 times BOM cost if through a reseller.  This means my target BOM cost will be around $20 US.

BOM cost is the cost for all the components that make up a product.  Some businesses include labor cost and some don’t.  For this project I will not include labor cost.

Intellectual Property (IP) licensing also has to be considered.  For most businesses this is decided in policy.  Open source licensing makes sense for this programmer design.  To be universal, it’s going to need to be tested on thousands of different chips.  I am directly familiar with three families of chips.  It is helpful for the programming algorithm developer to already be familiar with the chip. I will be researching and picking a specific hardware and software open source licenses for all IP of this design.  I want this design to be build-able by most of my readers at least in the breadboard stages.

BOM Cost $20 US

Open Source IP for hardware and Software

Research licenses