Don't call me pessimist, but I think nobody will be interested :(


On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 12:17 AM, Werner Almesberger <werner@almesberger.net> wrote:
I asked Christoph Pulster and he confirmed that he sold his last
ATUSB and only has a few ATBEN left. I also asked him if he would
like to make more but he doesn't want to get into production.

So, does anyone else feel adventurous and would be interested on
doing this ? All the components should still be available. Maybe
the manufacturing company that made the PCBAs (PCBA = PCB +
components + SMT) is still around and has the old films and
stencils somewhere, in which case there could be a slight discount.

If I got the numbers right, then making the 120 ATUSB PCBAs cost
about EUR 2510 in 2011. To this add the labour cost of flashing,
testing, and sales. Of these 120 boards, three had problems
revealed by production testing. One of these was a soldering flaw,
one was a missing resistor, and the third an incorrectly placed
chip.

Details on the boards that failed testing are here:
http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/pipermail/discussion/2011-June/008362.html

The production process is roughly as follows:

1) prepare design files. This can be a reuse of the fab packages
   from 2011:
   http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/wpan/fab/atben-pcb-110330.zip
   http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/wpan/fab/atben-smt-110330.zip

2) order the components. Do this before committing to anything
   else.

3) get PCBs made

4) get components SMT'ed

In the case of the boards made by Tuxbrain, the manufacturing
company did steps 2-4 for him.

5) separate individual boards from panel

6) flash the firmware and run the production tests. See
   http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/wpan/prod/

7) sell 'em.

For testing, you need a known to be good set of ATUSB and ATBEN
boards since some of the parameters of the test setup depend on
the physical arrangement at your site and therefore have to be
determined there. You also need a Ben, a Linux PC, and a
programming adapter.

The programming adapter looks like this, though one could make a
slightly nicer one:
http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/wpan/tmp/atusb-pgm-20110203.jpg

- Werner

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--
Felix