[Arm-netbook] Improv And Operation:Marketing for EMOA-*

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 10:44 PM, Boris Barbour <barbour at biologie.ens.fr> wrote:

> the components and assembled the boards. All for 2500 GBP. That gives me
> hope that the expense for much smaller runs would not be so great. I think
> we'd have a lot more chance of finding 20 people who'd stump up 100 each to
> get through one or two revisions.

  boris, i appreciate you're still catching up, here: we went through
the 20 boards process already, last year.  the first run was a cock-up
(junior designer even got the board size wrong!  i didn't make it
clear enough, apart from anything).  the second was 5 units (success),
the third was 30 (also success - hand-assembled the connectors, it
showed in some cases, but the recipients were able to sort out those
few units that had solder bridges).

 so with access to an extremely large factory with fully-automated
assembly lines that are capable of doing 20 million units *A WEEK* we
managed to negotiate them down to a *very* small run of 2500 units.
it was only through personal contacts that we managed to do that:
their normal sample batch MOQ is 50k to 100k because the lines are so
fast that it simply isn't worth their time to roll out the tapes and
reels.

 so, if we make the minor revisions, i would want to get a batch of 2
to 5 made up just to confirm that they're good.  i have a company in
the UK that is prepared to do that.  then because we know that the
rest of the PCB works fine (NAND, HDMI, SD/MMC etc.) i think we could
go straight to 100 to 500 units on a crowdfunded site.

l.