On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 2:39 PM, Stephen Adolph <twospru...@gmail.com> wrote: > I, for one, would be interested to see the economics of ordering a batch. > > I personally don't think you can do it. I have sourced parts carefully to > keep costs low, in order to enable a bit of profit for club 100 and myself, > but in no way did it compensate for the time.
That's basically the issue. I timed my last assembly and it took 50 minutes to assemble, program, and test. Assuming I can pack and ship it in 10 minutes (which I can't, but let's keep the math easy), my rough breakdown estimate shows I'm paying myself ~$30 an hour for this work. But I haven't factored in any customer support time or returns. So far, the approach I'm pondering is to start with a small batch run, say, 15-20 boards, but place a larger order for some of the cheaper components to get their price down a bit in anticipation of a future run. The CPLDs don't get any cheaper until qty 1k so no point in stocking up on them. I would sell them as a pre-order to fund the parts purchase. Then, assemble/test/ship/etc and see if I burn out. If not, do it again in a month or so. If I do, meh - I've got a few partial reels to pass on to the next sucker who wants to build a run :) -Josh
