For those who didn’t get in on the MachXO2 price break back in April, Lattice Semi is making the MachXO2 Pico Development Kits available again for $29 through December 31, 2011. (Regular price is $49.)
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For those who didn’t get in on the MachXO2 price break back in April, Lattice Semi is making the MachXO2 Pico Development Kits available again for $29 through December 31, 2011. (Regular price is $49.)
Yeah, right! When I tried to order that two weeks ago, shipping to Germany was $46 via FedEx. Thats what I call stupid company policy. I would not mind if they just put it to an envelope and airmail it. This way they will not sell much of them, its just not attractive.
Yeah. What Georg said. The insane shipping to Europe is what put me off when this first came around and it doesn’t seem to be any better this time :(
this looks cheaper for european people:
http://www.msc-toolguide.com/lattice/device-family/machxo/pico-development-kit.html
The $99 PCIe FPGA board looks a little more interesting (Normally $299) but the IDE and others seem rather pricey. Thoughts?
The PCIe board is pretty much useless without the associated software tools unfortunately. You need them to generate the bitstream necessary to configure the SC/M FPGA and that is only available from Lattice. The Starter edition of ispLEVER that you can get a free 6 month license doesn’t support the SC/M so you have to get the full version.
Unfortunately, I figured that was how it worked :(
@Eurofriends, one XO2 board is still $40.39 shipped to California.
No manufacturers here seem to want to ever ship via mail ($5 USPS, no insurance) — pretty much everything goes out UPS/FedEx.
IIRC, Cypress won’t ship anything for less than ~$13, whereas TI and Freescale seem to ship domestically for free.
One of the distributors here spammed me for months with a “great 50% off XO2 deal”, but wanted $17(!) it. Lattice came out cheaper in the end, so I went with them.
Time and time again stuff gets shipped more cheaply from China than from within my own state. Seeed’s a great example of that.
that is, “$17 to ship it”
I’m not mentioning Nu Horizons here by name, so don’t ask who it was.
I should be the one complaining. FEDEX and UPS Shipping to Peru is $100 on most online stores like digikey or mouser. On top of that you get charged %40 of CIF value as customs duty when the package arrives. (0.o)
I wish there were more companies who could send packages by USPS.
Personally, I would have no expectations that USPS would send anything out of the US by itself. The handoff to other national carriers is probably what adds to all of the delivery time and uncertainty (risk).
At least FedEx/UPS/DHL/etc tak eend-to-end responsibility for their packages. This is probably unappreciated until something goes wrong. Untracked and uninsured services are cheaper for exactly that reason.
Maybe we should do a shipping cost campaign ;) But without any joking, I can only say thats foolish by this companies. I’ve not done much work in my job with FPGAs and CPLDs but there might come a time where I have to use them for professional reasons and I will sure as hell not use Lattice parts.
My guess is that the rationale is that the recipient is more often than not a corporate user that wants the package to be trackable, to get there faster, and wants access to relatively pain-free support if the package does get lost.
Most hobbyists prefer taking their chances for 1/3-1/2 of the private carriers’ shipping cost.
And the fact of the matter is that most people nowadays expect the highest level of service at a discount price point. They’ll only pay for Yugo shipping, and scream like crazy when they don’t get Mercedes support.
I can’t entirely blame the senders, to be honest. But it would be nice for them to charge for just actual cost, and that doesn’t always seem to be the case. In the end, you just need to decide if the total cost of whatever it is that you’re buying meets your value expectations.
Lattice isn’t going to be dumping a lot of free product on the street like sometimes fall from the the deep pockets of some of the other players out there. But at the same time, what they appear to be doing with the software licenses for their dev boards is lame (to put it nicely). I certainly wouldn’t buy a dev board that didn’t have a guarantee of an endlessly renewable SW license. Having to pay for a license if/when you go into production is perhaps another story.