Hello FC community, I've got some updates on the quest to produce our own FCDEV3B Calypso modem boards:
1. I am still waiting for a definitive answer from my anonymous off-list contacts as to whether or not they are going to cover the PCB fabrication for us, and if they are, what timeframe should we expect. They emailed me last Friday suggesting that they are going to be covering the PCB fabrication whereas I will need to take care of the assembly both for ourselves and for them, but the way it was worded makes it seem like a tentative proposal, and I am still waiting to hear something more definitive. 2. The good news is that if we have to cover the PCB fabrication on our own, I found another fab that can do it for much much cheaper than the first one I got quotes from. The previous price figures I was going by, where it would cost about $6200 USD to make 10 boards and going up from there, were from Sierra Circuits aka ProtoExpress - they are a PCB fab in California, USA and I started with them because I had good experiences with them in the past on much simpler boards - I used them back in 2009 to make PCBs for my SDSL modem design. But as soon as I did a little shopping around, I discovered that their prices are crazy high. I don't know if it's just Sierra or all "first world" PCB fabs, but I know now that Chinese fabs are a lot cheaper, and contrary to what I heard before, at least some of them are perfectly willing to do small quantities. The nice fab I found is www.pcbcart.com, and what is really neat is that their fully automated online instant quote calculator form can handle complex boards like ours. With most fabs the automated instant online quote calculators can only handle simple boards, whereas complex ones like ours require manual quoting, i.e., one has to send the design files to the fab company for manual review and get their human to generate a custom quote. At first I assumed that pcbcart was the same way, so I sent them a link to our gerbers and asked for a custom quote. A couple of hours later their sales rep replied to my inquiry with a PNG attachment - it was a screenshot of their online quoting form with all specs entered correctly, fully capturing all price-affecting properties of our board! I was then able to go to their site myself, enter the same parameters, and then play around with different order quantities and other settings, and immediately see the price quote for each option without having to bother a human - so neat! By playing around with their form, I determined that the best deal we can get from pcbcart is to order 25 boards for $2274.83 USD - contrast with the $6200 or so that Sierra wanted! 25 boards would be the optimal order quantity for the first fully-at-risk batch - given the online form which allows one to see the price for any quantity without bothering a human, I checked out of pure curiosity how much it would cost to order just one board - it said about $1500. Ordering 5 or 25 pieces would cost about the same because of the way the per-unit price goes down with quantity, thus 25 pieces definitely seems like the right sweet spot. All in all, if we have to produce the first batch of our FCDEV3B boards (I call it the at-risk batch because the costs would have to be spent before we can know for sure that our design is good, that our aftermarket-sourced Calypso chips and other such parts are good, and so forth) on our own without any outside sponsor covering any part of it, we would need about $4200 in total to make this at-risk first production batch: order 25 PCBs and then populate between 5 and 20 of them depending on the level of demand for finished boards. This total cost breaks down as follows: * about $2300 for the PCBs from pcbcart, after adding shipping; * about $450 to order the remaining "special" parts (the ones that are no longer made new and can only be obtained as surplus on the Chinese grey market, just like Calypso &co) from my trusted supplier; * about $600 to order 20 sets of those parts which are readily orderable from Digi-Key/Mouser/etc - it's about $30 per board, so adjust accordingly for different build quantities; * another $600 to reball the Spansion flash+pSRAM BGA chips from RoHS to SnPb using a BGA reballing service - yes, I plan on building our boards with real SnPb solder, none of that lead-free crap - but for this one critical BGA chip only RoHS parts could be found, hence they would need to be reballed; * $220 for the Kamaya RAC101A3C parts - these ones *can* still be bought new, without the uncertainties inherent in sourcing parts from the grey surplus market, but we would have to order a full reel, hence the non-trivial price. Thus if we have to crowdfund the production of our first at-risk batch, instead of the figures I put out last week (need 15 board preorders at $650 each) we can go with lower figures: let's say we need to gather 10 board preorders at $450 each. Is there enough interest in these boards amongst our community to where we could gather 10 preorders with prepayments of $450 USD each? I shall keep you all updated if I hear anything more from my anonymous off-list contacts. Hasta la Victoria, Siempre, Mychaela _______________________________________________ Community mailing list [email protected] https://www.freecalypso.org/mailman/listinfo/community
