So contrary to "tl;dr" I did read your posts.
Still have questions like:
What's your opinion of daily volume?
How many assemblers?
You said you saw stuff going out the door? Any more specifics??
Did you see anything that was contrary to what "the haters" have to say?
You mentioned something about 7000 Jalas, does that mean that they have sent 7000 since they started?
To be honest, daily volume was hard to estimate, I was told all of the wafers have been fabricated, but it sounds like there is a supply line issue from the bumping facility to the binning processor to the place in Chicago that populates the PCB boards. IIRC, the binning facility is supposed to ship 5k chips a day, but had not come close to hitting that mark yet. Maybe they are getting close as I saw 8-10 assemblers and Dave mentioned an additional 8 starting next week, Josh mentioned that they were farming out the Jalapenos to a subcontractor and if enough boards from Chicago arrive it sounded like Will might win his 2BTC bet. It'll be close.
The building there is about 110 feet or so from front to back. I was in the parking lot out front when the FedEx truck showed up. When I had gotten to the back of the building I was looking through a space about a foot wide between the burn-in semi and the back of the building and could only see the driver carrying packages into the truck. As it was 102 degrees and no shade, I only watched for a minute or so before heading back to the front where there were trees to stand under while waiting for PG. As to USPS shipping, there were several of the 'cages' the post office uses there. Josh said they fill the cages and that way the driver can just wheel them into the truck instead of making piles at the back door. Saves time for all involved.
In the one thread, I mentioned that using bfl.ptz.ro you could see that a minimum of 938 Jalapenos listed from Jun 23 to the end of Jan along with where the other lines were. I felt we could triple the total and get a good lowball figure for their shipping to date. That would be ~3000 Jalapenos which was kind of scoffed at as too high. I then commented that I felt the true number of Jalas was closer to 7000(my gut said 10k, but I went with 7k) than the less than 3000 the others believed. I straight up asked Josh if I was right about it being closer to 7000 and his response was yes, much much closer. I would have to take that as meaning they shipped somewhere between 5k and 7k Jala's, which is the closest I got to actual numbers.
I did see a timeline on a VAP board for gen 2, but as Josh told me it was not set in stone, I feel repeating anything I saw there would just cause more flaming. I will say that I feel confident that they will have all 65nm product caught up before the Monarch is supposed to debut the end of the year, but that is merely my opinion after seeing them at work.
At the meet-up Tuesday evening, Sonny was there. PG and I talked to him quite a bit and I found it interesting that they were originally working on the FPGAs for an entirely different purpose when someone brought the idea of using them for Bitcoin mining. PG was curious about the name Butterfly Labs and Sonny explained how the work they were doing before had something called a butterfly effect. When you graphed the results, you had a fairly distinct butterfly shape. It was an enjoyable get together and I personally found them very forthcoming on all of my questions, even the embarrassing ones I did not relate in full here due to my own discretion.
