How cheap will this actually be...?

We keep talking about how important it is for our reader and strips to be cheap so I guess we should go into the cost breakdown of these components a bit more. I'm just going to talk about the reader in this post. The cost of building our prototype reader is about $10-15 depending on where you get parts from, but we estimate that the actual device could be produced for under $10. It should be cheaper because a final design will need less of our currently expensive parts because the circuit itself can be redesigned that way and because some parts that are currently useful for testing the device will no longer be necessary. Buying parts in bulk also should reduce costs somewhat. The housing is currently cardboard and eventually would probably be plastic, which is generally pretty cheap.


Another cool thing about the device is that it has the potential to be locally manufactured (easier with a basic analog reader like this than with a more complex normal glucometer). It also could be much easier to repair.