On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 6:59 PM, Boris Barbour barbour@biologie.ens.fr wrote:
Apologies if this turns out to be a stupid suggestion.
Calculations for prototypes have so far been based on runs of O(100) fully assembled boards. Would there be any possibility of paying for a handful of PCBs, a couple of sets of components (farnell, RS, digikey)
yes of course (except some of them are only available from china, but that's ok)
and finding a volunteer with some equipment to assemble by hand (paste, oven, ...)?
if they're prepared to do it, yes. there are however quite a lot of components, they're quite small, but it is doable.
I'm no expert (it probably shows), but the board doesn't seem hyper dense in terms of components.
it is, but there's nothing smaller than 0402. the smallest drill sizes are i think 7mil, but there are not many of those (they're for the Micro-HDMI)
Of course, there would be no econmoies of scale at all, but it might provide an affordable way of inching past the all-important debugging and validation stages.
we achieved that 100% debugging and validation phase back in i think it was october of last year.
so we are talking about fully-tested, fully working hardware that is ready to go into larger production runs for clients.
l.