I took a look at doing the flash/EEPROM bit but that is going to be difficult and it would require some testing (even though I said I wouldn't do it) to make sure it doesn't screw up exiting working circuitry. That would really push back production on these so I decided to leave it out.

I have my test board going out to my tester and I have my last shipment of prototypes being made. I should have them by Wednesday or Thursday. These are just to make sure the new PCB configuration fits properly in both old and current Solakian cases.

So now's the time to start finding out demand. If I produce these things, I need to know how many people are seriously interested and in what quantities. I'm going to set the price at 55.00USD + S&H. This leaves me with less than $2.00 of buffer (I just rounded the cost up to the nearest $5.00) per unit if I produce in quantities of 50. And, some of my costs (like shipping components and PCBs) are still only estimated right now so it's as low as I can go. If I produce 100, I can gain a little more buffer, but not much.

Additionally, since I'm soldering everything except the CS8900A chip myself with no real profit margin, I'll have to ship these things without any warranty. The only thing I can guarantee is that I will test them in both RR-Net and TFE modes before I ship them.

Also, if I do produce them, I will be able to take paypal, personal check, cashier's check, or bank drafts, but no credit cards. I'm not sure how my bank will deal with foreign currency. I'll find out and make sure that information is available in the announcement. I'll have to look up what my charges will be if I use paypal. Since I have so little buffer as it as, I will probably have to pass those charges on to the purchaser.

Let me know and I'll see if I can get these things made. If the demand shows that I can produce them, I'll post in the News forum announcing availability.

If you wish to PM or email me with your responses to this query, please feel free to do so.

I'd be interested if you'll accept PayPal payments.

I think that's just good. We have managed on RR without. It's not a problem.


You should find a European distributor: Protovision or Vesalia. That way people around here should be much more likely to be interested. For regular European buyers normal wire transfers or direct debit must be supported.


Oh. In that case I don't think anyone will want them.

_________________
Commodore 128 Programmer
City of Kouvola, Finland

http://mydarkgothvampiricplace.endofthe ... Commodore/

Sorry - I haven't noticed the warranty issue before. This makes me a lot less interested. I mean I can pay more as long as I get the warranty.

Wire transfers probably wont be a problem. I'll check with my bank to see if they support it (I'm sure they do) and what would be involved. I can definitely work with a retailer. Once I probe demand, I'll start contacting them to see if they're interested. If you are a retailer interested in this unit, feel free to contact me, preferably via email which is available in my profile on this forum.

The lack of warranty is due to the fact I would be selling these pretty much at cost. I'm not trying to make any money and I don't want to turn this into a business.

That said, warranties are line items in a product's cost so if the consensus is that a warranty is required to make this viable, then I can increase cost to cover a warranty. So, consider the $55.00 to be a price without warranty. While I can look up the failure rates of the individual components, I don't know the failure rate of the full unit so I can't rightfully calculate the cost of the warranty. So, while I figure out a reasonable method to calculate that, let's assume you can get the card with a 90-day warranty for $65.00. The warranty would not cover physical damage to the card, but it would cover component failure for repair/replacement. To get your warranty repair, you would have to ship the card back. I would troubleshoot and determine if repair or replacement is needed and ship a working unit back to you via standard shipping.

I should also state that you can always buy insurance from the shipping companies so if you want to tack insurance on to your shipping charges to protect the unit in transit, we can arrange that too.

And what kind of warranties are being offered by other people right now for C64 products? I've looked at retailer sites and see no mention of warranties.

Please understand that I'm not trying to screw anyone over here. I want to help out but I also don't want to spend a few thousand dollars on this only to lose it all. I can't really afford to do that.

Warranty is good, and I think most people would pay little extra for that. $65 is still a very reasonable price for this product, especially with the Dollar being low. But $2 is a very very tight magin. If I were you I'd throw an extra $5 in there just for your own safety, also for the fact that you're putting in a lot of time and effort in this. It is *still* a very reasonable price IMHO.

Can you give us a rundown of the costs? They seem extremely high. Are you planning to order the devices ready built? The components surely don't cost much. What are the costs that push up the price?


I have assumed Individual Computers obeys the law, which states that a mandatory warranty period of six months must be honored. But you are a private person, selling these as yourself? So in that case I think it would be unreasonable to demand you do the same. This law applies to professional manufacturers and sellers. Of course, if your cart would be sold by a retailer, then it would be applicable. Anyone correct me if my judicial info is inaccurate.


I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that and I don't think anyone thinks so! I renew my statement that it's great you are doing this - especially pro bono. You should talk again with c64reloaded, if they are back to business, coz I'm sure there is some market in North America for this product.

_________________
Commodore 128 Programmer
City of Kouvola, Finland

http://mydarkgothvampiricplace.endofthe ... Commodore/

RaveGuru:

I thought about doing that earlier, but I was kinda hoping to avoid the business model for this. I wanted to keep this in "hobby" status. If I have to go business-core to make these then I may very well take your suggestion. But I also want to keep the price low enough that people will want to buy it. Even if an extra $5.00 is not unreasonable, fewer people would be interested which increases the risk of the bulk purchase.

FMan:



Sure. I'm basing all of this on quantities of 50, so keep that in mind for the line item costs which are listed per unit:

1. Components: $21.22 (includes shipping to me from distributor)
2. PCB Fab: $10.03
3. PCB Assembly: $8.84
4. PCB Shipping: 1.00
5. PCB Prototyping: $13.00

Total: $54.10

It was $53.71, but I forgot to change the transformer to the one that worked as opposed to the one that didn't. Now that I've updated that, I have less than $1.00 of buffer.

The PCB shipping covers all shipping costs between fab, assembly, and me. The prototyping covers what I've spent on prototyping including my attempts at soldering the ethernet chip myself. I've actually spent a bit more than that, but that's OK. I don't mind spending a little bit on this as long as it doesn't exceed a few hundred. The PCB assembly covers just soldering the ethernet chip. The rest is soldered by me. Surface mount components are soldered by me with solderpaste in a toaster oven (a makeshift attempt at a reflow oven) and through hole components are soldered with a soldering iron and solder wire.

One thing to note is that the ethernet chip increased in price from about $9/chip to $13/chip since I started this project. While that's a single quantity price, the multiple quantity prices for that chip also increased accordingly.

A couple of things to understand are:

- Quantities of 50 - 100 are still considered to be prototype quantities and priced as such by almost all the fab and assembly houses I check out. The real price discounts on components and services start to happen in quantities of 200.

- To order a quantity of 200, I would have to drop about $5k on this beyond what I've already spent. I would need confidence that I could sell a reasonable amount of units before ordering that many so I would need to go to pre-orders and get enough pre-orders to justify spending that kind of money. Right now, to be honest, I don't know that I can sell 50 units, let alone enough to make 200 of these. If I could make 200 at a time, I would be able to sell these at $50.00/unit +S&H and still be able to cover a warranty and have a decent profit margin.



That may be a law in Europe, but there is no law in the US requiring a warranty. The laws here require certain things if I do specify a warranty, but it is not required to offer one. 90-day warranty is a very common warranty here in the US. The most common warranties I see are 90-day, 1 year, 3 year. Of course, you'll find all kinds of warranty periods which are all based on what you're buying and from whom you're buying it. I've even seen 20-day warranties which really just act as DOA coverage.

Something I've been thinking about lately was a cheaper ethernet card that would not be compatible with the RR-Net could use the Microchip ENC28J60. Those are going for less than $3.00 a piece in quantities of 50 or more. We're talking about 25% - 33% the price of the CS8900A which is the most expensive part on that board and requires me to send it out for soldering. I can get the ENC28J60 in an SOIC package that I can solder so the soldering line item would be gone. Those factors reduce the cost by $17.30/unit in quantities of 50. But, this is an SPI chip and would require a little extra glue logic so it may be more like a $15 - $16/unit price reduction. I think that is a topic for another thread considering the title of this one and how far along we are. I'll probably at least design it for fun. I can breadboard it because the chip is available in a dip package so prototyping costs would be drastically reduced as well.

I don't think anyone really thinks I'm trying to be shady, but as far as I know I've really only met one person in this forum in person and I know that it can be hard to trust someone you've never even met. I'm glad you guys don't think I'm trying to do swindle you. I just really love to do C64 geekery and I was kind hoping to get involved and be a part of what's left in the C64 world. While I'm definitely looking for business opportunity, I want to keep the C64 as a "pure" for-fun hobby. I'm kinda afraid that if I go into business mode here, it will never end. After I get this project wrapped up, I kinda want to go hog-wild on projects for the C64. How this one goes will determine how I approach future projects.

I think you need to also factor in testing and 10%(?) failure rate as you obviously can't ship a defective card.

TheBeck:



Thanks! That's good advice. I'm looking at warranty costs and calculations and I've adjusted figures for 10% failure rate.

All:

With the prototyping numbers posted previously, I'm already eating over $300 in prototyping costs. So I did a piss poor job of prototyping.

I've made a decision. I'm going to run this like a business. I'm going to consider the prototyping costs to be startup costs and lessons learned and remove them from the cost model. I'm going to set the price to cover parts, labor (this will eat into my IT consulting) and warranty.

So here's my proposal:

$65.00US + S&H. 90-day warranty. Bulk pricing will be available. I will ship to anywhere in the world if you're willing to pay shipping. If this goes through a retailer in other countries, I'll research the laws (including warranty) and make sure I comply. If I can get a demand of at least 50, I'll produce. Otherwise, I'll withdraw. As always, PM and email responses are welcome.

Hmmh. Does anyone else think that these figures are quite high? I'd be willing to bet you can find someone to make the boards for less. Maybe order them from Taiwan? Dunno but the cost of 500 dollars for 50 PCBs sounds very expensive to me...


Wat? Almost nine dollars to solder just the one chip??? Try to look around to find a better deal!


Oh. To be honest, I'll be a bit surprised if you can sell 50 of these, coz many people already have TFE or RR-Net. But again I could be wrong. The weak dollar works for you, coz it lowers the price for foreign buyers - for example on today's rate $65 is just 42 euros. Your idea of doing a 28J60 board sounds interesting. Maybe that one will come with ROM and fantastic firmware.


Really?! Wow. That's .. archaic.


Well, I'm not claiming to be a great judge of character, but you certainly don't sound fake to me. I'd be more worried about your side of the arrangement - if you do accumulate 50 pre-orders, be prepared to get a lot of "oh, I didn't really mean it" or "I don't want it anymore" and such, when it's time to deliver and collect payment...

How determined are you to go through with this project? I don't want to discourage you, because I think it's wonderful that you are working on 64 hardware, but I have to question the viability of this product. That is, at least examine carefully if it's worth it or if it'd be better to skip it and start doing something else now - if you aren't too much in love with this.

_________________
Commodore 128 Programmer
City of Kouvola, Finland

http://mydarkgothvampiricplace.endofthe ... Commodore/

I've been searching around and these are the best prices I can find for the tolerances required for the TQFP 100 CS8900A. That's the real gotcha. I could get cheaper if that chip had bigger tolerances. I could also reduce prices if I set the fab time out a few more weeks but it's not a big difference.

That is also the best deal I could find on single chip soldering. Keep in mind these are low quantities. 50 chips soldered on 50 different boards is still prototyping for most people so the prices are a LOT higher than if I can get a run of 200 units.

Yeah, I'm not sure about the ability to sell 50 either. If I were sure of it, I wouldn't probe for demand, I'd just make them. I'm a little skittish on this one but I already have 12 units spoken for with other non-quantitative interest mentioned. I also plan to take these to C4 in June. I also am hoping to attend World of Commodore so that may be another potential outlet. We'll see what happens over the next week or two with the demand.


And people here in the US keep preaching that a low dollar is bad. Bah!

The alternative ethernet I'm considering would come with flash and eeprom by design. But I doubt I'll release a project that's just yet another ethernet card after this. That would be complete overkill. It would really just be a one-shot just to do it.

Archaic? We're still using our C64s . . .

With regards to your last couple of paragraphs, that is exactly why I'm asking about demand. I'm a little worried that people will change their minds later, so I'm going to make my decision to build or not to build within two weeks. Hopefully reducing delay will reduce the potential for backing out. I'm not too much in love with this to drop it. I just want to gain some confidence before taking the plunge.

Thanks for the continued feedback. I really do appreciate it!

This is what i like about this particular Ethernet cartridge and sets it apart from the other ones.



Its tidy and fits perfectly into a cartridge changing the cs8900a would for me be a bad idea.

Of cause if there was a way storing the mac and network information so that on power up its automatically loaded into the cartridge this would enhance the cartridge and put it on the upgrade list for those that already have a Ethernet cartridge..

If you go ahead and market this as a business then you would need to include a warranty 90 days sounds about right.

I would try to keep it as hobby as possible.

I don't think its a crime "yet" to make a little money out of these projects it only encourages others and yourself to do more and add more feature's and benefits into the project .

Anyways good to see it coming along enjoy!

_________________
Have Fun!!

mind you the other cart's are available for sale .

Hows it all going.

_________________
Have Fun!!

Yeah! Requesting an update, over!