Sony PlayStation 3 rush hour

It has been a while since a ‘magic pill’ for Sony Playstation 3 has been discovered causing the well-known console manufacturing giant suffering from huge financial losses, sending shockwaves across the Net, knocking down high-performance servers, stimulating abnormal demand for USB development boards and USB AVR processors in particular. All of a sudden thousands of people became hardware and firmware designers just overnight offering basically anything that could be potentially sold to PS3 owners for absolutely inadequate prices. Why is it so? The answer is simple – human greediness and ignorance, unwillingness to think rationally.

Let’s go through all key moments of this topic. First of all, there is a game console that is sold cheaper that the total cost of its design, components, assembly, testing and so on. Sony does it deliberately hoping to cover its expenses later and get some profit by selling games. Attempts to exploit the console to get an unlimited free access to all games that supposed to be bought means that less really good games will be produced just because developers (especially good ones) will be underpaid and eventually will face the prospect of leaving the company. Apart from this, the act of jailbreaking as such is against low, in other words, it is illegal. Everybody knows that, few consider it as a problem.

Even assuming that many gamers do not feel any remorse buying ‘the magic key’ it is still unclear why they are ready to pay the amount a few times more than real market price of the device. Indeed, that is really strange because the major driving force of the jailbreak was actually a desire to save hard-earned money, not waste. But what is happening it reality? Let’s follow the chain of events in chronological order. In peaceful times widely-recognised Teensy++ 2.0 board was about $30 USD. After referring by Resellers starting sell Teensy acticle the board price jumped to $39.89 USD. Already surprised? It is just a beginning. A lot of questionable hardware begins to appear, there is only one example: PS3Key. The ‘author’ wants to get $49 USD for it but look at the PCB soldering quality! Apparently, he was in such a hurry that did not have time to wash the flux away. Still it is not that bad if looking at the ebay item PSGroove-clone-Teensy-AT90USBKEY which was sold for $99 USD.

Simple calculations allow to estimate the real product value. Look carefully at Teensy schematics The most expensive components would be PCB itself and the USB AVR chip. Taking into account PCB dimensions and its complexity it should be sold at about $10 (try to compare with kits at Adafruit resource). As for the chip, AT90USB162 is priced for $3.71 USD, ATMEGA32U4 – for $6.04, AT90USB1286-AU – for $10.61 at Digikey, and it is retail, not bulk price, which means that the device’s real market price should be about $25 – $30 USD. As you can see, there is no point to rush and buy something that is quoted as much as $99 USD just because it is hot and popular at this very moment.

The bottom line of all this is really simple. It is much easier to hack something than build something. The application of AVR micro processors is much more broader, more interesting and more entertaining than just cloning USB PS3 keys. Be creative. Be inventive. And let the Power be with you.

Magictale Team