Topic: [RUN 2 CLOSED][SIDEHACK STICK]GekkoScience Compac Official sales thread - page 11. (Read 69935 times)

I see what you're saying. For the same total price as 10 from me, he could get 6 or 7 from CrazyGuy.

Yeah, $50 is really high. I haven't seen that price, but then I haven't really been looking. I know CrazyGuy's Amazon sale price was pretty high, but we've already been over that - gotta add a billion percent for Amazon's cut, stuff like that. Middlemen always cost more. One of my favorite "I hate middleman markup" stories, my uncle runs an aluminum die casting factory. They had to buy back some parts once which had failed an inspection somewhere, but they had to buy them back at shelf price. The bid for manufacture was $1.35 per unit but shelf price, by the time they changed hands to the packager and wholesaler and distributor and retailer, was about $40 a pop. Effin' ridiculous.

I think he meant instead of buying 10, he can buy 7 for the same price (of 10). As in, he does not have to go through you to spend his "allowance". Weird formulation, but thats how i read it yesterday.

It kind of bothers me seeing people selling the sticks for 50$(+shipping) though, feel ripoff.

Just got a message from sidehack. (with dot in the end)(Brand new account)
Telling me he has 10 units for sale... Be aware he is a scummer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Actually, you can't buy them from a reseller for the same price because the reseller buys them from me for the same price and then has to mark them up. We did a no-bulk-discounts sales on this run, which I do like the fairness of that policy (everyone, no matter the quantity, got the same lowest price we could feasibly offer) but in the end there's a heck of a lot more hassle with 20 people buying 50 sticks total than with one guy buying 20 sticks. The reseller has to deal with the 20 people buying his stock, but I don't have to, so after BM1384 Compacs I'll probably shift back to tier pricing so I get a bit more for the trouble of single-stick orders and give it back to the resellers who themselves have the trouble of single-stick orders as well. Kind of a load-balancing strategy, you understand. The effect on the end customer is not substantial whether they buy straight from me or from CrazyGuy or whatever, but it helps out CrazyGuy or whatever who are taking a heck of a lot of load off me in getting our stuff in the hands of customers. So if I can adjust things to maintain fairness to the end customer while helping out the folks who make my job easier, I will. But that won't affect pricing on the rest of BM1384 Compacs.

I might have enough bulk sales lined up to start a second batch, but I need everything to be confirmed and coordinated before announcing anything.

go to crazyguy  he has some at Asicpuppy.com

Well if you decide to do another batch, i want 10 of them!!!! I am telling you from now 

Just got my shiny new toy in the mail !!!!   


Thanks

I don't know, 25 or 50? I'd like to see at least 200 committed to purchase; if I can get them all paid down I'll start another batch of 500 with pull chips.

sidehack so what would be the moq for future sales for the resellers?

No direct sales

Topic says closed.

Check with asicpuppy.com in US or bitshopper.de in EU, they're the resellers.

Are there any left,  I would like to order one or two.

good idea then you can focus on the manufacturing and hardware side of things 

If you live in the United States and have not yet received a Compac order, your order shipped out today. I would have gotten more done today but I wasted half the day rebuilding a main breaker on the shop's loadcenter panel so I could get lights and workstations back up and going. Fortunately hosting is on a separate subcircuit so I could switch servers and routers over to emergency circuits. I'm hoping to burn some time this weekend completing the hosting expansion and then early next week finish out the remaining Compac orders.

I'm still deciding whether or not to do another batch. I may end up not taking in direct sales and sell only to bulk resellers, as I put up about 87 orders from the first 1000 Compacs and about 800 of them were to about 20 sales (of the 505 sold in the second half, 431 were from 8 bulk orders). Wrangling sales and packing a berjillion small boxes eats up a lot of time, and I'm already busy fleshing out and managing a 100KW hosting center and designing and manufacturing all the goodies. And hopefully there'll be more goodies coming down the line.

That might be worth considering. I could raffle off dibs on prototype Compacs with BM1385 ASICs and original Compac hardware, which I'll probably build a few anyway as initial tests before we tear into microcontroller comms and digital voltage control.

So today I built 100 Compacs. Pretty impressive when you consider how much manual work goes into the process. When I started, 30 was a good day. By the end of the first batch, 50 was a good day. Today I had 70 made in 7 hours and then stopped for dinner. Also I was used to seeing about 10-30% require second-pass ASIC reflows to work properly; I think I first-pass reflowed maybe 8 of the 101 I touched today and 100 of them work. So kinda sucks that I'm at the end of the run; heck if I could have busted them out this fast from the start the shipping queue would have been maybe a few days wait tops. Oh well, experience gained for the next project. I'm more optimistic about pods if ASICs reliably work right out of the oven, and I've pretty well figured out all the calibrations for the robot and improved PCB layout practices and how our solder paste behaves and manufacture in the future should be a lot smoother.

If you think about it a three month wait is not that bad , sense side does have most of it down now, it will take him less time, once he has those chips, etc etc  ... so yea  you are so right ...

SO does eBay now , i couldn't believe it the other day, i stopped selling on eBay. on eBay they call it a final value fee for shipping in top of the big final value fee and then all the other little shit fees, that do add up and next year there fee system is getting worse.

Something about you must make so many sells a month to keep your high ratting as a seller for there so called discounts they get back with other fees.

I started talking to Guy the day they announced the SP50, and things were looking pretty good. The ASIC package was not, per my opinions, as nice to work with as the Hammer (SP10) but a heck of a lot more promising than the Rockerbox. I got all the info out of him I could without signing an NDA, to see if it was worth it, and it seemed worth it. So now I know more but it's under an NDA and I can't talk about it. You do know that I'm still looking for chips, and they are still a potential source.

Regarding an S7, if I was going to buy one and pull only a couple chips I might as well pull the whole board. String topology and chained comms, if you yank one ASIC the entire board is down. If it comes down to it I'll buy a board from philipma, who has been offering for two months to give me one. That'd get me 54 chips but I refuse to let him give me a fully working board for free and right now I don't have the budget to pay for it, and I especially don't have the budget to buy a new one. That's why I'm trying to convice Bitmain to get me a dozen or two ASICs - I can pay for that (even at S7 prices) and it'd buy me a cool month of head start on prototyping so I could jump right in once they like bulk sales.

Why not just buy an S7 and remove a chip or two from a board for testing? At the very least you can have a prototype working if they every decide to open up sales.

I gave up selling on ebay, I have alot of good usable gear to get rid of but dont want to deal with people ripping me off by sending their broken gear in place of mine for a refund and the like.

That would be sweet if they offer a few to mess with until they decide to unload some chips. That way you can prototype sticks, pods, or blades or what ever is in the thought pipeline. I can only imagine the speed of said gear and how much lower you can get the efficiency. I pencil modded the resistor on the huge heat sink compac like you stated but the stick just makes noises, I dont think the powered hub is giving it enough juice.

Yeah, I got pretty tired of eBay customers back when it was my main source of income. I don't know how many times I got offers on things where people wanted 50% off the list price. A lot of times I was selling something like a grade-A 17" Dell monitor for $50 shipped and jerks would try to haggle me down to like $30 or less. After fees it wouldn't even cover material cost and shipping, let alone packing materials, parts and labor, or me being able to eat this week. So many idiots on there.

I did get a response from Bitmain overnight. I pretty much laid out to them why selling us chips would be good for their business (including that they're getting a cut of sales they don't have to work for, and sales in market sectors they aren't even in, and increased R1 sales when Gekko-capable firmware exists, and the good publicity they get from community support) and they said what we're doing sounds interesting and they'll consider selling in the future when they aren't focusing all their chips on S7 manufacture. To which I responded, if I could get 10 or 20 chips that'd keep me busy for a while with prototyping. For real though, 20 chips would buy me at least a month of prototyping before I came asking for anything more.

So hopefully that turns into something. Not terribly optimistic for anything anytime soon. We did get samples of BM1384 about three months after the S5 started moving, and the S7 has only been moving for about two months so by that timeframe I've got a bit of a wait yet. Course dev should be faster this time around since a lot of work will already be done. If we have another Compac it'll be a bit more complex than the last one so to integrate software voltage control, so it'll have a controller and firmware kinda like the pod. Which I should be working on the pod next week, as soon as I get the Compac batch finished up.