we're still waiting on a tracking number for the PCB's, the conference is in just over a week!  and i can't finish the code til we get the first one made... oddly enough this hasn't been the closest we've cut it, but its getting there.

since there is a huge disparity  between vendors ( and findchips.com is so useful ) i've been trying to get parts from arrow for a while, they have my old address in there and only they can update it, i started requested that three weeks ago  (and yes thanks Arko, i did try calling ) . Today I  gave up and asked them to let me order it over the phone, of course the parts weren't in stock, even though they show up as in stock .

They found them on cut tape vs reel, and gave me reel pricing, so that was nice. I also picked up some SAM7 32KB's for people who just want a basic badge that does something. As with the last few L1's i'll probably spend most of the con writing code or building badges, my neoden TM220A is reeled up ready to go, ( don't buy the 220, get the 240 i didn't follow my own rule on this and it definitely wasn't a good idea.

Neoden are coming out with a new model as well, i'm guessing around June, but I'm also guessing it'd be a higher price, if you do buy from Neoden, don't accept the first quote, they'll drop the price.

I like the Neoden, its pretty straight forward, we have our Juki conversion as well, but that's at Null Space again and not in my garage, and its unlikely we'll get it set up in time, the TM220A I keep at home.

One of the problems I find we run into is that its easy to get into the mindset of buying parts from places like DIgikey who'll ship out a few hours after you order sometimes, so you think , yeah plenty of time!  Since we're rev'ing the design as we go its been tough to order ahead, parts get forgotten about,. We use Google Docs Spreadsheet with a modified version of bom-xs.ulp to handle parts and ordering.

We set attributes in the schematic for each PART

MPN/PARTNO manufacturer part number (some BOM scripts use others)

DIGIKEY digikey part number, i'm going to change this next revision, and add DIGIKEY-REEL or something to specify reels etc for Jellybean parts.

OEM manufacturer

Here's an example of a part

I fill in the part number from mouser/newark etc ( you can see here MF is set to the wrong thing!)

It can also be exported to a database that you can share with others.

bom-xs.ulp creates an order, or parts list and then we can paste it into digikey, or arrows BOM managers and they'll quote it, as well as show parts that are duplicated or not available, expect that a lot!

Shown by Values

Also useful for handing kits, BOMs and just general checking. Document and update the attributes as you go along, consider ALT's as well. We've gone through a couple of BOM managers, but bom-xs has worked out the best for me so far, i even wrote a digikey scraper that pulled in parts to a local SQL database to get better matching than the website offers. But I didn't have time to finish it.

It can also query Digikey for pricing, but it needs some love on that side of things.

I've thought about trying to get this working with findchips to get the lowest price/quantity from whomever, but it isn't setup for that yet. I'm just glas it works as well as it does at the moment.

If you take enough care with the attributes and parts, you can pass on the list to other people, the more you do upfront and just as important, getting people to use computers to do the work, versus how we typically do it and end up doing all the slug work ourselves.  Eagle does  hard code some values into the part when you make it, so think about that, like a CPU that can be 32/128/256 variants, use the variants, all it does is change the name/value.

I wish eagle had more interactivity when its in a ULP, typically changes you do in the ULP , you generate a script, and run that on exit of the script, I also wish it was non blocking so i could keep working in Eagle while the BOM is open.

Another thing i'll do is export all the parts into a library, then replace it so its all tied together, the XML edit makes this faster.