I asked Christoph Pulster and he confirmed that he sold his last ATUSB and only has a few ATBEN left. I also asked him if he would like to make more but he doesn't want to get into production.
So, does anyone else feel adventurous and would be interested on doing this ? All the components should still be available. Maybe the manufacturing company that made the PCBAs (PCBA = PCB + components + SMT) is still around and has the old films and stencils somewhere, in which case there could be a slight discount. If I got the numbers right, then making the 120 ATUSB PCBAs cost about EUR 2510 in 2011. To this add the labour cost of flashing, testing, and sales. Of these 120 boards, three had problems revealed by production testing. One of these was a soldering flaw, one was a missing resistor, and the third an incorrectly placed chip. Details on the boards that failed testing are here: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/pipermail/discussion/2011-June/008362.html The production process is roughly as follows: 1) prepare design files. This can be a reuse of the fab packages from 2011: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/wpan/fab/atben-pcb-110330.zip http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/wpan/fab/atben-smt-110330.zip 2) order the components. Do this before committing to anything else. 3) get PCBs made 4) get components SMT'ed In the case of the boards made by Tuxbrain, the manufacturing company did steps 2-4 for him. 5) separate individual boards from panel 6) flash the firmware and run the production tests. See http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/wpan/prod/ 7) sell 'em. For testing, you need a known to be good set of ATUSB and ATBEN boards since some of the parameters of the test setup depend on the physical arrangement at your site and therefore have to be determined there. You also need a Ben, a Linux PC, and a programming adapter. The programming adapter looks like this, though one could make a slightly nicer one: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/wpan/tmp/atusb-pgm-20110203.jpg - Werner _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
