[hpsdr] Bare Board people

Thu Mar 1 22:10:24 PST 2007

Definitely split the order between Digikey and Mouser. The high minimum
parts are typically available from Mouser in much smaller quantities.
Mouser generally does not have the fancier ICs though.

For example, I've attempted to attach a spreadsheet for Janus that is
_nearly_ up-to-date and split. You will have to touch it up a bit.

	Chris - AE6VK

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason Hitesman [mailto:jason at hitesman.com] 
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 9:31 PM
To: hpsdr at hpsdr.org
Subject: [hpsdr] Bare Board people

***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****

I'm looking to get in touch with others who are considering the bare
board and or bare board w/ hard to find parts options.

This being an open project I wanted to try and do something to help
those who are going this route.  But it looks like I'll need more help
so I'm looking for others interested in pursuing building their own
HPSDR's rather than buying pre-built boards.

I started putting together some pages to help automate ordering the
parts for Janus:
http://yumaduners.com/jth_upload/hpsdr/janus_bom.html

The problem was when I used it to submit to DigiKey as I feared quite
a few items had minimum orders well above the necessary quantity.
Some FAR above.  I made up this version using the minimum quantities:
http://yumaduners.com/jth_upload/hpsdr/janus_bom_large.html

I did one other version of this which uses prices from digikey to show
the actual parts cost per-board vs. the cost to do a minimum order:
http://yumaduners.com/jth_upload/hpsdr/combine_boms.html

Now - this is just the digikey parts - not the parts from mouser or
other sources.

But it becomes readily apparent that either substitute parts available
in smaller quantities or an alternate vendor that sells them in
smaller quantities or some form of group purchase on parts will have
to happen for just about anyone to do a bare board.

I'd rather stay as close to the official BOM as possible for
consistency - but that would mean definitely having to arrange a group
buy.  And while I'm more than willing to help sort, package and ship
parts I don't have the cash to buy pre-built boards within the short
time frame they're available...let alone put up the money for a group
buy.

The other option is to search out other supplier or part options to
get the minimum quantities down to something reasonable for the home
builder.  And again my skills fall flat here as I'm no good at all
when it comes to searching the parts suppliers catalogs.

The good news is the page I made generates itself off a CSV file - so
updating the part numbers and quantities is real quick and easy.  The
page could also be expanded to allow ordering of more than one set of
parts at a time...I based this off an old page the MegaSquirt project
used for their partial kits to help people order the parts not
included in a partial kit.  Their new version is far more advanced but
something similar could still be done
(http://www.megasquirt.info/v3bom.htm).

So if someone else wanted to research alternatives I could give them a
copy of the CSV file to update.

I can also do a page like this for Ozy fairly easily...it's mainly a
matter of massaging the BOM into a CSV and eliminating the non-digikey
parts.

Something similar can also be done for the mouser parts.  The forms
for mouser and digikey could even be combined onto one "Order" page to
help the potential builder get these parts.

All of these have some bugs in them and the data is probably not 100%
accurate as I haven't checked it after the various things I had to do
to get it to play nice.  Some things about the original BOM also
fouled it up (like audio jacks being listed one per line instead of
all as one item with different references.)  The combined page
espically has some issues since it's trying to merge the official BOM
with the results from DigiKey.  But it does give an idea as to which
parts would benefit from a group buy.

But before I put anymore effort into this I need to find others who
are interested in the kit approach and want to help as I've done
enough to show myself that I can't go any further without assistance.

So...any other builders out there who want to help?  I'm not trying to
compete with TAPR...just give an option for those who would rather
build their own boards and need to find a way to get the parts to
populate them.

-----
Jason Hitesman
N8INJ
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