[TriEmbed] Pololu motor drivers.

[jonjwolfe at anibit.com]

Some of you may have noticed that Pololu's almost canonical stepper and 
dc motor driver break out boards have had a steep price drop sometime in 
the past 6 months. I think I've spoken to a few of you about it.

As a hobbyist, I love it because their driver boards are great. The 
re-seller side of me was slightly frustrated at the depreciation of my 
inventory(I go out of my way to avoid carrying items at risk of going 
obsolete, expiring or depreciating ).

Jan Malasek, the founder of Pololu has a blog post about their motor 
drivers and pricing decisions that confirms some of my suspicions behind 
the price trend:

https://www.pololu.com/blog/410/big-price-reductions-and-new-options-for-our-popular-stepper-motor-drivers

In short, there is a lot of pressure coming from cheap Chinese clones 
and outright counterfeits. Pololu manufactures a lot (maybe all?) of 
their own boards in-house in Nevada, and they don't have the negotiating 
advantage Chinese manufacturers have.

I think what I will probably end up doing soon* is dropping all of my 
prices to match (or almost match) theirs, even though it means I will 
literally take a loss. It is better than sitting on the "underwater" 
inventory forever, and I can at least write off the loss.


--Jon

(* - "soon" = some unspecified time in the future, when I have had time 
to run numbers and do more research. )