In the interests of transparency, here's a list of companies I've contacted for quotes so far:
- Sunstone Circuits
- RelianceCM
- Westak
- Colin Fitzgerald
- Cascade Systems Technology (Still out. I dropped the ball and just today picked it up again.)
- Hi-Tek Electronics
- SMT NW (Still out. No reply since 8 days ago, so I'm counting them out for now.)
- PCB Unlimited
- Screaming Circuits
- Bright Manufacturing
- PJRC.com
- ESP Seattle (Still out. No reply since 7 days ago, so I'm counting them out for now.)
- Two or three California plants that only had contact forms on their websites. (They never emailed me, so I wasn't able to find any records in my inbox.)
I also had someone from Dorkbot offer to beat whatever price I could find online if I paid half the price of a pick and place machine. I'll be following up with them later, but for now I'm going with Tate Technology's quote.
I plan on opening escrow and figuring out batches soon, as I think I've got a good enough feel for how much this is going to cost now.
- Sunstone Circuits
- RelianceCM
- Westak
- Colin Fitzgerald
- Cascade Systems Technology (Still out. I dropped the ball and just today picked it up again.)
- Hi-Tek Electronics
- SMT NW (Still out. No reply since 8 days ago, so I'm counting them out for now.)
- PCB Unlimited
- Screaming Circuits
- Bright Manufacturing
- PJRC.com
- ESP Seattle (Still out. No reply since 7 days ago, so I'm counting them out for now.)
- Two or three California plants that only had contact forms on their websites. (They never emailed me, so I wasn't able to find any records in my inbox.)
I also had someone from Dorkbot offer to beat whatever price I could find online if I paid half the price of a pick and place machine. I'll be following up with them later, but for now I'm going with Tate Technology's quote.
I plan on opening escrow and figuring out batches soon, as I think I've got a good enough feel for how much this is going to cost now.
Awesome. Thanks for doing all this legwork.
Are you seriously entertaining quotes from California companies? There's some plants in the valley I could take a look at, if you'd like - seems like the least I could do. Been too busy the past couple weeks to send any RFQs.
I've got some concerns about how the Avalon chips are going to be loaded into a pick-and-place. I assume they come on reels of 10,000 (can anyone confirm?) but they're going to be all cut up into strips by the time they get to you. Any ideas?
Also, it occurs to me that we haven't discussed heatsinks. I imagine you might want those included with the miners, right? I'll start looking at prices in order to get a ballpark figure, but from what I've seen on the Klondike thread, I expect that to kick the price up by $3 to $5.
I'd defintely want them on my boards, or at least included. It'd be tough buying heatsinks at a good price as an individual. $3 to $5 wouldn't be bad at all. I'd be more concerned that we actually won't be able to get enough of them - heatsinks tend to be made-to-order rather than off-the-shelf.
Vycid
