exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

exxos wrote: 04 Jan 2024 13:10 Price for "untested" will be about £140 each. Again depends on current part prices etc.

In case anyone's unsure, that's a pretty decent price for a almost fully built board.

I was targeting £100 for home made! £40 for someone to do most of the work for you seems good value to me. :bravo:

BW

Badwolf wrote: 05 Jan 2024 11:00 In case anyone's unsure, that's a pretty decent price for a almost fully built board.

Yep. I'm using "more mature" fab houses these days which are a LOT more expensive than JLC. The PCBs can be obtained from JLC for really good prices in general. But when you to go to other fab houses the price goes up 10-fold kinda thing. But failures have been zero as well thus-far. Going to better or even UK fab and the prices got up a lot higher again. So I tried to find some realistic compromise with the prices on everything. I could go on for hours about all the costs & shipping costs etc but the majority of the money I made was on the FPU and CPU sales side of things. But I'm sure you can appreciate finding parts which run "at spec" isn't so simple either.

With this current "offer" I hope people will take advantage and it will be more affordable than a fully tested populated board. If people by all the parts from my store to finish it off then they are getting very close to the fully built and tested side of things then. People could use different CPUs or FPUs from China, but they have to deal with the consequences of that because a lot of them simply won't work.. You get what you pay for basically. But my aim is to make the initial purchase price as low as possible to encourage more people to get involved with the project. People can buy the CPU's from my store anyway if they wanted known working stuff or take the gamble. But eitherway, if anything , it splits up the cost of putting on of the things together.

I have about 15 DFB1X coming without the CPU socket. There will be classed as "bare bones with birdseed". I have no price yet, but expect around £140. These will likely be in-store in about a weeks time.

I have about 30 DFB1X also coming WITH socket, where the aim is to sell them fully complete and tested as before. However, I need to somehow fit a ZIF socket to a DFB1X to test CPUs and rate them at either 40MHz or 50MHz along with the FPU's. It's not a 5 minute job. So I won't be able to work on this for the next few weeks.

Note, it is possible there may be 40MHz and 50MHz options. The 50MHz versions will likely be more expensive because of "binning CPUs" which don't meet my qualification for extended 50MHz usage, similar with the FPU.

Also note the DFB1X WITH socket will be the last batch. It has become a royal PITA to ship stuff to China aside from the incredible expenses involved ,and I'm afraid I won't be able to solder them on myself either. Any future batches will be "bare bones" only.

Sorted out my next DFB1X test board for testing 030 CPUs. The FPU can cope with 50MHz fine. So I can verify better what the top speeds of the CPUs. I can run FPU test at 50MHz constantly to make sure the CPUs are stable.

What's in the box...


All 3 variations will slowly be added to stock over the coming days. The "barebones" are already in stock.

https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/atari/store2/#0272

There are now 2 50mhz ones back in stock.

I'm also considering using the plastic pack CPU for some 40mhz versions as those are cheaper than the ceramics. It would get the price of the 40mhz versions down a little bit. But mostly people have been requesting the 50mhz versions. Though I doubt all the batch will make it to that speed.

exxos wrote: 24 Feb 2024 18:36 There are now 2 50mhz ones back in stock.

I'm also considering using the plastic pack CPU for some 40mhz versions as those are cheaper than the ceramics. It would get the price of the 40mhz versions down a little bit. But mostly people have been requesting the 50mhz versions. Though I doubt all the batch will make it to that speed.

And now there are none! Definitely want a 50mhz one, as I have found both ram and speed would be nice for my testing of things.

Interested in a 50Mhz one, or a fully built board with firmware and sockets and no CPU or FPU.

tjlazer wrote: 27 Feb 2024 03:06 Interested in a 50Mhz one.

leech wrote: 26 Feb 2024 21:56 And now there are none! Definitely want a 50mhz one.

I've added 10 PRE-ORDER items to the store. I suspect I will have 10 50MHz ones soon. But again, this is a PRE-ORDER, it will take about 2 weeks (possibly longer) before I can ship. I did the pre-order so people can "reserve" one. First come first served basically.

It takes a lot of time to test 50MHz. After that I will run out of 50MHz FPUs. So if nobody wants 40MHz, then I will have to start testing FPUs again to find the 50MHz capable ones. This won't be a quick job.

Awesome! I put in my preorder, along with the updated 3-in-1 video adapter. (Is it bad that I put off jobs when I buy new parts, this means I can wait a few weeks before I swap out the NVRAM as well...)