Quote Originally Posted by cncmachineguy View Post
You have answered you own question.
First, the decision to have the boards made in China is not mine but the distributor's (who is helping fund the development).

Second, were it my decision, they would still be made in China. It's the difference between having something that can be sold at a competitive price and having something that cost 5x the market retail price with no hope of selling any. The Arduino market has thousands of boards available selling for $10-50 depending on whether bare, kits, assembled and on what's onboard. The last time I looked at US assembly was about 10 years ago - the president of the company was a friend - the quote was about 10x what I could get them for from China.

Third, I spend about 20 years in the machine tool industry culminating in my running the US operations for a (small) multinational builder of machine tools so I empathize with your position but, it's about 30 years too late. The Reagan administration decimated the US machine tool industry and it's not likely to ever recover. (ASIDE: One of my customers made programmable machines that assembled through-hole components onto PCBs - I never dreamed I might want one thirty years later.)