exxos blog - random goings on

[exxos]

Got a bit distracted again... I have fixed the white background on these animations, if anyone spots any other white background ones then let me know...

[exxos]

Needs more STE's to test with...

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[exxos]

As I hate soldering so much I have been seriously considering getting one of these...

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There are a few different versions of the same thing like A dual head one...

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Or a totally independent dual head....

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Of course the more heads etc the more costs than these get seriously expensive!

This really comes about as I'm having to package stuff up and send it elsewhere to be assembled, which of course costs money, even though they do charge very good rates, it was getting onto around six months before I got the last boards back For example yesterday and the day before I was soldering GAL chips all day on the STE boosters.. I have other boards I need to get assembled as well.. But now because of the virus, it could be looking more like next year before I will be able to get them back in stock again. Larger assembly companies will charge around £20-£30 per board, and it is just a ridiculous amount of money for such small boards that I produce.

So I'm basically thinking the lower cost models I would get my money back on it in 2-3 years anyway. And it would just save me a lot of hassle in not having to ship stuff backwards and forwards and it would save money on postage and damages also.

Also those machines seem large enough to hold 2 H4 motherboards. As I am looking to get the SMT stuff done at the PCB factory, what is left would basically be the through-hole components which I could assemble here myself... I have been talking to @Icky A lot about trying to reduce costs to assemble these boards... Again the place I'm using charges about £50 to build one up... which I do not think is unreasonable, but if I were to get 30 boards built, thats £50 x 30 = £1,500 outlay alone.

Of course it would take a little more time for me to place components on the board myself, but I could probably get my girlfriend to do that job for me anyway.. It would probably take a while to program such a large board on the machine, but once the file is set up, it would only really be a matter of changing the boards on the assembly machine.

The heck up in all this is that some of the SMT parts like the DAC being a specialist part, could not be assembled at the factory.. In fact the factory assembly is limited to basically very generic parts only. So I may still have to send the boards off to have the final parts fitted, but even so sending a small number of parts is still a lot cheaper and easier in the long term anyway.

[exxos]

Amongst tweaking stuff in my store, I have fixed the script which logs where in the world my orders come from..

Of course currently with so few orders UK is winning ...

...So will revisit this in six months time

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[PhilC]

@exxos its about time we won something

[exxos]

Finally got all these finished, just need to bag them up tomorrow now...

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[exxos]

Having a easy day today, watching terriblefire live and testing CPUs out...

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[10p6]

That looks like fun

[exxos]

That looks like fun

Yep.. hours of fun... Even more so as the STE died earlier

[exxos]

Onto the next mission...

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And my work area of today is the window ledge, as I need to stand up for a bit anyway...

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