On 8 Mar 2008, at 14:49, John Griessen wrote:
Michael Meeuwisse wrote:
On 29 Feb 2008, at 23:51, PcgScrapAddy wrote:
I am interested in getting my hands on one, what's my cost for
the little gem?
At the moment the price is €150 ex shipping, mostly because
startup costs are high and with the little profit that's in there
I can start setting up a company, etc. I'm afraid this sounds a
little high for people used to US dollars, but I can't afford the
USD ;)
I could maybe make this as a small volume product... I found a
machine vision assembly company
that can put together a 7 x 15 cm board for $4 if you get a batch
of 50.
That would be brilliant. I have to admit that I haven't put a lot of
effort into it yet to see if I could some bottom price somewhere. I
just knew some people wanted a card, fast, and was polling for interest.
And I'm
working with a Chinese board maker on single copper plus conductive
ink 98% SMT boards with few holes that
are cheap and good. For high speed paths, a separately made ground
plane adhered to bottom of the board
and solder connected by some through holes or wrap around edge
clips might be needed, but the cost of
a PCI card with gold plated edged connector could be BOM + $5 in
volume of 50, higher $$'s if lower numbers,
lower $$'s if higher numbers.
I'm not entirely following you here, but are you suggesting a single
layer design? In that case, forget it. It was nail-biting annoying to
get it to fit on two layers, I am somewhat convinced it can't be done
with any less.
Also, when I speak of some people, I currently mean 5 cards counted
for. I'm personally not interested in 45 spare ones. :) If you can
realise the proposed price point however this might change.
Can your board be done with < 300 SMT pads, 105 cm sq, some paths
used for jumping over others
with 1 or 2 Ohms resistance, the rest heavy etched copper? If so,
maybe I can be your supplier
now that the Euro is so expensive, (USD is so cheap).
We could trim a little at the edges I assume, but not much. I'm not
sure how much cm sq it's right now. I do know it's currently at 310-
ish vias, so <300 is probably doable.
I'm not offering to fab for you, but to make and sell an open-
hardware product to early adopters
on this list, including you...as a way of boot-strapping up my
operations. For a BOM of
fifteen different parts costing $22 total, + $5 for fabbed,
untested boards, and a pre-order of
twenty boards, I could probably do the layout and minor design
tweaks needed to fab my way
and sell tested for $87 US + ship if paid by VISA to a google
checkout button.
Right now it's 33 different parts, of which the first one (the FPGA)
is already $25 each, or $22 per 25 from digikey. Feel free to see if
you can get them cheaper, but I doubt the entire BOM will be $22 if
you try to make 50 boards. Full list with digikey order codes here;
http://wacco.mveas.com/digikey_order.php
Please note that this list isn't definitive. The CPLD needs to be
replaced with a XC95288XL, the VGA adapter isn't held in place by
anything (the holes for screws are empty - I know there are adapters
with pins at those spots) and the USB mini connector is 'too low' in
the sense that the connector won't really fit any cable if the card
was held in place by a PCI bracket - the thick cable would touch the
lower side of the bracket. And speaking of the bracket, people will
probably appreciate one. Although for early adopters this might be
skipped. :)
Also, I went for the €150,- pricepoint for much the same reason as
you're saying that you can boot-strap your operations - whatever is
above the actual costs (I doubt it'll be much in the end, but still)
can be used for setting up a little company around the project, or
ads, etc.
That would depend on some unknowns like:
how easy is it to run enough free open code on some 2001-vintage-
cheap-extra-computers
with PCI slots to test the hardware assembly,
connectors,
I'm not going to create any cards before I verified basic
functionality like the PCI connector. At the moment once the card is
plugged in, the entire system is downgraded to an elegant power
supply. I want to make sure it's because of the complete lack of PCI
protocol in the CPLD, and not some design error.
how fast after the prepaid order everyone wants boards...
I am thinking 6 weeks could be possible, even with the
bare boards coming from China.
I think that too. Do please see if you can make some work out of
this. I very much favour playing with hardware designs, not so much
with setting up a business. If you can push the price down
considerably, I wouldn't mind buying one from you instead of figuring
out everything myself.
John Griessen
Cheers,
Michael
www.projectvga.org
_______________________________________________
Open-graphics mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics
List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
