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S-100 PCB manufacturing order

NobodyIsHere

Veteran Member
Joined
Dec 21, 2006
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Hi! If you are interested in getting some manufactured S-100 PCBs I am putting together another order. Which boards and and prices are determined by the quantities ordered. These are for the S100Computers.com and N8VEM S-100 boards:

Regular prototyping board
Buffered prototyping board
Backplane (6 slot w/active termination)
IDE
ASCII keyboard

Please contact me by email LYNCHAJ (AT) YAHOO (DOT) COM

Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch
 
Hi! I sent out an email to people who I think would probably be interested. So far several people have responded and I am keeping a spreadsheet of who wants what boards etc. Due to the limited size of these manufacturing runs and expenses involved most likely this will be done in phases. I'll start with the biggest quantity board and order and distribute it. Once the payments clear and I recover the costs of the run I'll do the next board on the list. Most likely that will be an S-100 backplane PCB first since it is the oldest and has the most people waiting followed by the S-100 buffered prototyping board. Hopefully the phasing will allow the extra time needed for the boards with the lower demand to accumulate a viable quantity.

The minimum practical order size is 10 PCBs which results in a unit cost of about $27 give or take a few bucks plus shipping. The S-100 backplane is already there. If I can get up to 20 units the unit price drops to around $20 each. I may order some extras to round out the order but not many since the demand is pretty thin and I cannot afford to buy a bunch of PCBs that sit around. This is not a commercial venture so there is no way to carry an inventory of PCBs. Unfortunately the S-100 boards are large PCBs and expensive which leaves me little margin to work with. Late last year, I did a run of the regular S-100 prototyping boards and the quantity got up to around 40 PCBs and I was able to reduce the unit price into the high teens if I recall correctly.

I am going to contact the PCB manufacturer and ask if I can "bundle" a bunch of small PCB reorders into a single lot. Frankly, I doubt they'll do it but it won't hurt to ask. It certainly would help the process though and minimize the overhead of multiple transactions like shipping and the like.

The best way to help this along is to to pass the word to other interested hobbyists. Since these are reorders of existing boards they have a known track record. The S-100 regular prototyping board, buffered prototyping board, and backplane seem to be OK as is. The S-100 IDE board will get a minor respin to fix a couple of traces. It is basically a known working unit. The S-100 ASCII keyboard will also get a respin but the changes will be more extensive since it will be its first revision since its original run. All the boards work fine so it really is a matter of how convenient they are to use. Obviously the newer boards have less history and more minor issues to shake out.

Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch
 
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