Hi! I placed a PCB manufacturing order for the S-100 4MB SRAM boards! They should be here in mid-February or so.
Now that the S-100 4MB SRAM boards are ordered, we should discuss and consider the next round of PCB reorders.
The next board with the highest number of builders on the waiting list is the S-100 buffered prototyping board. That could be next assuming we get enough builders in the queue to go forward. Currently there are 13 builders for it in the queue.
However, personally I would like to see the S-100 EPROM (11 builders) and S-100 IO (7 builders) boards get ordered sooner because both of those have minor issues we could clean up in a PCB respin. I do not think the S-100 buffered prototyping board needs any changes so it would be a straight reorder of boards like the S-100 4MB SRAM board. Also the S-100 EPROM and S-100 IO are really important boards for builders making their own homebrew systems from scratch.
I have some questions for our S-100 hobbyist community:
What boards would you like to see next in terms of reorders and/or PCB respins? I normally gauge this by the number of builders in the waiting list and a bit of subjective preference.
The reorder and PCB respin process is tied to the number of builders in the waiting list. It normally takes about $500 to do a PCB respin and about $450 for a PCB reorder. That’s why I need the 20-25 builders in the queue for a reorder or PCB respin. However we could change this calculation by increasing unit price. Frankly, I would prefer to keep the unit price as low as possible and $20 seems to be the “acceptable pain” threshold however the waits between PCB orders can become excessive.
If we bump up the unit price we can order boards with a lower quantity of PCBs. Would the builders be open higher prices and smaller quantities of boards? This would allow more frequent respins and PCB reorders but at greater cost. The default path is we just wait until the queue grows long enough to warrant new orders at the current unit price. I believe it will happen eventually but it may take a few months. This could vary over time and/or by board depending on builder preferences.
I appreciate very much the tremendous support received from the S-100 hobbyists and seek more improvements in developing and supplying S-100 boards for our community!
Thanks and have a nice day!
Andrew Lynch