Hi folks, Over at Personal Telco Project, we have every few years done a group order from pcengines.ch (the ch stands for Switzerland). Pcengines is a one-person design shop that develops and sells single-board computers, initially a thing called the WRAP board, then the Alix and these days the APU. They are designed to be routers with optional miniPCI or miniPCIe interfaces for radios. The prices are good, but the shipping has historically been around $40 per order, which is why we've done group orders, to reduce the sting of the shipping charges. It looks like the last group order I did was in 2016. I think we did the first ALIX order in 2009, we did another one in 2013.
What I have done previously is to collect peoples' requests, put them all in a spreadsheet, collect money, place the order, allocate the shipping costs on the basis of weight (the invoice nicely details the weight of each item in grams), and then distribute the gear when it arrives. Depending on how well I know the person, I may want the money in advance or may wait for money until delivery. People from PLUG have participated in the group order previously, which is why I'm trolling this here now. The main motivation for an order now for me is the APU4, which is a 4-core 64-bit x86 based board with 4 real ethernet interfaces. Most wireless routers really only have one or maybe two ethernet interfaces and an embedded configurable switch chip. The APUs are beefy enough to NAT and route at gigabit speeds, so they make good gateway routers for people with gigabit fiber services. The APU4d4 board with 4GB of RAM is $120. A case and power supply are a little extra. You can find a price list in USD here: https://www.pcengines.ch/newshop.php?c=4 If you see something interesting, APU or not, at pc engines and want to participate in the order or have any questions or want references from previous participants, please let me know. The APU4 that I want is currently out of stock but expected later this month. I'd expect an order placed in the next week might come in by late in November. Previous experience is that shipping time from Switzerland is about 3 days. Cheers, -- Russell Senior, President [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
