Those computer peripherals are $5 because they’re not a whole lot more than radios; the complex network processing is handled in the operating system of the host computer. The WiFi devices we carry are meant to connect to small processors with limited resources; the modules handle all the layers of network processing internally, and present only the final data via simple serial interface to the microcontroller. That’s a lot of hardware and firmware, and because the larger market is for those $5 modules that do require a full computer, we don’t see quite the economies of scale that those parts enjoy.
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