Throughout this thread, I have summarised and found people’s biggest issues with this product: price and safety. I will go over each of these issues as detailed and as openly as I possibly can.
For the safety issue, I am glad to inform everyone that we now have the CE and RoHS certificates to our own names so that I can share them with trusted and interested individuals here. We have tests and certificates done for both CE EMC and CE LVD, as well as RoHS; with these properly done and paid-for certificates, we are already a step ahead of most Aliexpress chargers out there. Outside the laboratory, we have also done hundreds of hours of recorded tests, with some just being about finding any methods of breaking this charger through both proper and improper usage. I know people are unhappy to see the UL and IP pending, and as I explained, it will be financially impossible to get those done legitimately, so we have opted to cease claiming that we comply with these standards (although the testing data fits within the regulation) until this project is financially ready. (I know @DerelictRobot has suggested ETL, so afterwards, I went and checked the pricing for that certificate, too. It indeed is cheaper than UL, but only by 50%, so unfortunately, it is still unviable.) I hope people find the current situation acceptable and trust my roadmap to get more certifications as soon as they are financially viable.
The price issue can be dissected into two sections: the component and manufacturing costs. Quoting the same people again, the efficiency of a charger isn’t coming from the material the MOSFETs are made with alone, as it is instead achieved with most of the components combined, which is done through good designing, thorough testing, and sourcing genuine and well-made parts. The goal of this charger is to be passively cooled in as small a form factor as possible that will be somewhat affordable, meaning it is vital for us to get its efficiency as high as possible. I am glad to report that we yielded a 96% efficiency, which allows the charger to work at full capacity long enough before thermal throttling. (In our previous engineering samples, we actually had a couple of prototypes which yielded an astonishing 98.5% efficiency, but the material cost for that BOM would just be completely unacceptable, all this is to say that we already made some trade-offs in order to make this product a reality.) Obviously, excellent quality components don’t come as cheaply as the components seen on Aliexpress chargers which only have to be okay enough to work. For us, not only did the components have to work, but they had to work well.
The manufacturing cost has to do with how these chargers get made. Since these aren’t and can’t be made by some random uni intern doing hand soldering, they are all crafted through proper factories providing SMT services, which is very expensive for smaller quantities (the operators would need to rearrange the machines, draft and design the print order, manually load all the components into the trays, and the actual printing/mounting is done really quickly, way too quick for just making these chargers in hundreds. The hassle is only worth doing in quantities of at least thousands or even tens/hundreds of thousands in order for the factories not to charge the setup fee. The quantity issue alone is hindering this charger from being made cheaply.
However, these are KNOWN issues for the cost, and the solution is also KNOWN, which is simply to make more at once. At 1000 pieces, with both the SMT re-purposing their machines for the charger less costly, as well as the cheaper components due to larger order quantity, the unit cost will be down to around $125 from the $200 it is now, adding in the shipping costs, the price is going to look much better at around $150 per charger. Compared to the $80 Aliexpress charger, the initial pricing of $300 seems insanely high, but at $150, it suddenly looks like all the benefits our charger provides can justify the price premiere a bit easier.
The only issue that’s left now is whether we will get 1000 or at least 600 - 800 orders or not have enough quantity made for the price to go down (and then nobody buys these).
I have broken down the finances as detailed and as openly as possible, and I hope this can answer and explain the issues you guys have had with this product. Please let me know if you disagree or find some of the logic above incomprehensible, and give me some new ideas/approaches/recommendations.
