Not really sure what the benefit of group buy would be here. Nuba Casa, the company that supports the development of home assistant and developed this product, already has a few products they sell. They had this stocked all over the world for the announcement and it sold out. I assume they had already made a few thousand. They will get more stock now and it will sell just like the other things they make. Any profit from this will go back into development of Home Assistant.
Heh thus far I've been an excited spectator of HomeAssistant, and wasn't aware of Nuba Casa until doing research for a different comment on the thread. I do love and appreciate their model here
I guess the benefits that came to mind are
- alternative crowdsourced route for sourcing hardware, to avoid things like that raspberry pi shortage (although if it's due to broader supply chain issues then this doesn't necessarily help)
- hardware forks! If someone wanted a version with a more powerful ESP32, or a GPS, or another mic, or an enclosure for a battery and charging and all that, took the time to fork the design to add these features, and found X other users interested in the fork to get it produced... (of course I might be betraying my ignorance on how easy it is to set up this sort of alternative manufacturing chain or what unit amounts are necessary to make this kind of forking economical)
