I am extremely excited to announce that our development organization has successfully delivered the Arduino Leonardo Clone with all the production activities available in India. This is one of our ongoing efforts to explore the possibilities to locally produce quality hardware within India and of course pass on the advantage of the pricing gain directly to our customers.
There were a lot of questions that i have received regarding this initiative in the past and i took some time with the decision makers at Tenet as well as developers and sales executives and put up this short FAQ . Hope this is interesting to read :
Q1 : Why does Tenet Want to clone the Arduino Leonardo ? What is it all about ? Is it to make more money ?
Developer : hmmmm…, I believe its cool to design something , its all about letting the developers and hobbyist out there know that Arduino leonardo is truly open source and folks out there can build something like this with the resources available in India. I don’t know if we would really sell the clone but if it does sell well then good we will clone more and eventually build some more exciting complementary hardware !
Sales : There are more and more people in India actively engaged in hacking, tinkering as well as building innovative smart systems with hardwares like the Arduino and it is quite evident that the right tools at the right price is a good value proposition to encourage more of this to persist. Cloning such open hardware would definitely provide them with access to do this more with less to worry about importing, sourcing , custom duties (heavy ) , Dollar/Euro and the Rupee math ..etc. As far as the money is concerned Tenet would make less or the same what we do with the selling of the Arduino Leonardo from Italy. I
Q2 : What does it take to make such hardwares in India ? Is it a smooth process to make in low volume ?
Developer : It is not that easy to find the right combination of hardware suppliers, PCB fabs as well as assembling entities in India for low volume production and this has taken us several experiments to find the right go to vendors who do a quality job ! Of course it was not smooth for us to make this happen with the timeline (10 days) that we had but nevertheless when we look at the final prototype it really feels good ! It is still painful to see that there are no one stop solution out there for customers to reach to get these kind of projects done and hope this situation will soon change. All said and done there are very good companies out there but its only a matter of fact that the service, price and quality all reach a certain level so that more such experiments could be executed.
Sales : Of course this is sheer excitement as well as planning to make such a hardware given that we have to keep in mind that the end pricing is less than the existing hardware as well as keep up the quality of the design as the highest priority. The ecosystem for producing low volume hardware is still not that encouraging but all said there are ways to get through this and find the right partners given enough research and study is done.
Q3: Is there a road map for these cloning activities and local production ? What is the future ? What else is planned ? Is it the right thing to do ?
Development : Yes, there is a great road map ahead. Just to give a clue there are about 100 products in the works as i am writing now. The timeline is still to be published though but for sure this would be exciting as i see it now. In future customers will see a great range of products starting from innovative touch screens, HMI, single board computers, and much more (secretive innovations) . Cloning activity for open hardware in general is debated the most , but as a company we believe that the activity should be in the right spirit, given that we clone hardware we would let the hardware open so that others can build on top of what we come up with and also release there version, of course this is in brief what openness is all about !
Sales: Our road map is well planned and of course in future there are a lot of exciting products that will show up on our web store. As always they will be open and of course they will be available across the globe (Yes ! You heard it we are actively working on plans to be global as a company ).If you are a company wanting to distribute or find out how to partner with us drop an email at info@tenettech.com and we will be more than happy to explore the opportunities.
Now that is all the interesting excerpts from my talk with the folks at Tenet, I am planning to publish the whole conversation some time soon once i gather them in a blog.
Now its time to see some pics of the "Pluto" and here they are :
We are still testing these boards and hoping to complete them soon, the board will be available for sale from the first week of august.
For more info to pre-order or book these boards please send us an email at info@tenettech.com
