Scrybe pretty much describes the process. Yes, I would like to have every order shipped by the end of the year, but it may be around mid January before we do that for the people ordering right now. I plan on putting my people on 24 hour shifts until all back orders are assembled and shipped.
Right now, the bottleneck will be the 24 hour burnin period, not the assembly... and I'm looking at ways to mitigate that or increase our burn in capacity.
- Awesome Dick out
I can't see why a 24 hour burn in would be helpful on average. If the Butterfly Labs community could prove to you that they would take as little as a 1 hour burn in, would you do so?
I think it is important to consider the following...
Suppose you're shipping 300 units (to a single entity, assuming the BFL buyers have a substantive consensus they would like a short burn-in) and you expect 5% to have major problems, surely, many of those problems would be identified within an hour. But suppose none of the problems would be identified in an hour. Now, out of the 300 units shipped, 15 of them have serious problems. Which would the consumer prefer? Would he rather have 285 units hashing away a day earlier than 300 units a day later?
Let's look at the math...
To make the numbers easy, suppose each unit is 1GH. Now the customer, in that single day, has 285GH (300, less the 15 RMA's). At the current difficulty, he would earn 86.75 with the 285 units on day 1. Suppose it takes a week before his 15 rigs arrive after he sends them back. So after 1 week, he earns 607.25 BTC, and then for the following week, he earns 639.24 (7days * 91.32BTC per day). After 2 weeks, even having to wait a substantial period of time for his RMA's, he still makes 1,246.49BTC.
Let's see how it works out if he has to wait a day...
He makes 91.32BTC per day, but only has 13 days to mine to catch up (you held on to all 300 of his units for 24 hours before shipping) so he makes in his first potential two weeks... only 1,187.16.
The community on average, becomes more and more worse off the longer you withhold their products from them, even in for burn-ins.
In addition, suppose someone needs to do an RMA, could they not simply send the device back and have BFL mine for them with a deposit of some sort? "I bought 1 rig and it is a dud. I'll send you back the rig along with an immediate deposit of 3BTC. In the meantime, start up another rig and let it mine on my pool account at your facility until you receive the bad unit and ship out the good unit. Then return the 3BTC as well."
Is this not a workable solution?
Or do you expect a much greater percentage of malfunctioning products than 5%, even with a 1 hour burn in?