The Bus Pirate v3 preorder has been a great success. Seeed moved to a second preorder because we, once again, exhausted the supply of critical chips available for the Bus Pirate. So much for advanced planning!
If you got in on preorder 1, your Bus Pirate is being manufactured at this very moment. It should ship soon with the latest v2.4 firmware and bootloader installed. If you’re participating in preorder 2, we’re trying to reduce the wait time as much as possible; we’ll gauge interest early next week and order chips ASAP.
You can still preorder an assembled Bus Pirate v3 with a red PCB for $30 at Seeed Studio, including worldwide shipping.
Look for new Bus Pirate demos and tutorials all next week. We’ll also give away some Bus Pirate goodies we have around the lab. Thank you for your support!
On a side note, it looks like this will probably be a pattern for popular preorder projects. Depending on the chips involved, there will always be a certain quantity that can be made from local stock parts. After local stock is gone, Seeed has to order more chips from big suppliers like DigiKey. Depending on stock levels, DigiKey then orders from the manufacturer, who pretty much produces chips on demand.
We’ll do our best to tweak the process and develop with widely available parts whenever possible. Thanks for bearing with us through the initial preorders.
I’m not “getting” these sourcing problems. It’s not like you’re Logitech or something. How tough should it be to get 1000 chips?
I remember reading a write-up from Joe Grand a year or two ago about having trouble getting something like 10-15K(?) Freescale parts for DEFCON badges one year. That I can get. But 1K, I’m just not groking.
-e
We’re limited by the stock Seeed can find locally in China, then they order from Mouser of DigiKey, etc. Nobody has any PIC24FJ64GA002-SS left at the moment. It’s not an especially popular chip, which is part of the problem.
It only takes Microchip about 8 weeks to crank out as many fresh chips as we need, which I think is pretty awesome. Someone like Logitech obviously plans their stuff more than 8 weeks in advance and getting the chips made is just a small part of that timeline. They also invest a lot upfront in planning and materials, something we can’t do (yet) because of lack of experience and funds.
Seeed is manufacturing on-demand for people who want a copy of a hobbyist project. Since this is just our third time doing a preorder, we haven’t been able to plan things months in advance or invest in lots of stock upfront that might never be purchased. I imagine it will continue to be like this for popular projects based on some chips, but we’ll get better about designing with readily available parts as time goes on.