Hand Assembly

I finished putting most of the SMD components on the CAT Board. Mostly bypass caps (around forty of those). I've left off the through-hole stuff since that isn't needed for the immediate tests.

Here's the front and back:

Initial testing starts tomorrow:

Check for power/GND shorts.
Check voltage regulator levels and current draw from 5V supply.
Plug it into a Raspberry Pi and see if one or both die.
Install Ed's yocto image with the IceStorm tool flow and generate a bitstream for a blinking LED.
Download the bitstream to the CAT Board and see what happens.

Discussions

Richard Milward wrote 10/10/2015 at 12:50

Dave, do you have any idea what the final price will be? Thanks!

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Dave Vandenbout wrote 10/10/2015 at 17:49

Richard, I've run the project through [kicost](https://github.com/xesscorp/KiCost) and got some rough numbers for component costs:

Qty Comp. Cost
-------------------------------
10 $24.60
100 $19.13
1000 $17.37

The caveat on that is I'm using Digikey/Mouser pricing for the FPGA and the SDRAM, and they don't really discount for those as your volume increases. You can probably cut $4 from the component cost by going elsewhere. So say $13 for enough parts to make 1000.

For PCB cost, I'd estimate $3.50 for a quantity of 1000. I'm not real confident in that number since the board does use some 8 mil drills and those are expensive.

So the total BOM cost for 1000 would be around $17. I estimate my local assembler could put them together for $10 each. For China, maybe $3 each.

That would mean each unit would have a *minimum* cost of $20 assuming no profit or payment for the person who's risking the capital and time to do that.

Of course, if you just want to build some for yourself and you're handy with assembly, you could probably build ten of these for $250 in parts plus $150 to get the PCBs from PCBWay. So about $40 per board. Plus sweat.

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Richard Milward wrote 10/10/2015 at 19:50

That's excellent, thanks so much for the thorough analysis. I'd been considering a different board (from eBay), but now I'll happily wait for this.

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Fred wrote 10/10/2015 at 12:20

Nice work! Can't wait :)

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Dave Vandenbout wrote 10/10/2015 at 17:27

Thanks!

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Yann Guidon / YGDES wrote 10/10/2015 at 04:46

Pretty !

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Dave Vandenbout wrote 10/10/2015 at 17:27

I suspect only people like us would think that.

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BGA Mounting on the Cheap

Initial Power Up

Discussions

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