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Messages
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Messages - matseng
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General discussion / Re: $6 clone vs. a $150 original
thank you for replying to this thread, it always nice to have input from the people that are involved in the issues discussed.
For a company $149 is a very low cost for a product like this, for a hobbyist that might use it once in a blue moon it's kinda expensive so I see that you would have a hard time figuring out what the optimal retail price of it would be.
Selling a special hobbyist-version of it will probably not work since your production costs for a device is probably higher than the retail price of a $6-$10 clone.
Maybe one solution can be to pseduo-legitimizing the clones by having a some kind of official way for paying $25 for the software for guild-ridden clone users like me? Without any kind of support of course. This would at least give you a small extra revenue-stream without any extra work or costs. I'm sure there are more people out there like me.
I've decided that if I actually have use for the analyzer twice during the next 12 months I'll purchase the real McCoy from you and then donate my clone to one of the many "starving university students" that I know here in Malaysia.
But I'll send you a postcard anyways.... :-)
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Project logs / Re: PAW21 - Tindog - SMD soldering practice #2
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General discussion / $6 clone vs. a $150 original
For $6 I get the device and a full set of cables, and some probes. Basically excactly the same thing as I get directly from Saleae for $149- but the clone is of crappier quality of course.
I've been looking at the Saleae for a while but never felt that I have would enough usage to pay $149 so I've stuck the BP whenever I had a need for doing some analyzing.
On one hand it's nice to get some cheap tools, but on the other hand it kinda feels like stealing the food from the table of the Saleae guys who has put in a lot of thought and work hours for the design and software - especially the software. They're probably doing just fine anyhow with popular a $149 product, but still.....
So what should I do? Send them $25 for the (free) software and say "Thanks guys"? Or just a postcard maybe? Personally I'd appreciate a postcard more than $25 into the company account. There should be some kind of "thank you - have a beer coupon" that you can send to people.
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Tools of the trade / Re: 3D Gerber Viewer
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Tools of the trade / Re: 3D Gerber Viewer
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Nope - grbv-20131008T0045-64bits.zip dies just as dead with these gerbers.
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Bus Pirate Support / Re: Why PIC24J64GA002?
[/quote]
Doing homemade PCBs - how quaint :-) 2009 is a loooong time ago.... Now Ian lives in Shenzhen where he can, for a few dollars, get professionally made PCBs almost faster than he can print,iron, etch and drill himself.
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Open 7400 Competition / Re: Nibbler: Another 7400 4-bit custom CPU
I wish that I was better at taking a project to its end and not stop at 90%....
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General discussion / Seeedstudio gift coupon
1 x Bus Blaster v3
1 x Bus Blaster v3 acrylic case
1 x Bus Pirate Cable
3 x Sick Of Beige Basic Case (DP5050)
3 x Sick Of Beige Basic Case (DP7043)
3 x Sick Of Beige Basic Case (DP8049)
2 x Sick Of Beige Basic Case (DP5031)
Thank you for the coupon Seeed, and thank you Ian for making cool stuff....
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Tools of the trade / Re: 3D Gerber Viewer
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Tools of the trade / Re: 3D Gerber Viewer
My guess is that they use a larger tool if there are no acute angles.
For the time being I'd be happy to just have the parts inside the center (if non-0 width) of the cutouts removed. No need for emulating the cutting bit with for leaving the corner-artifacts.
The gerber is generated with the .cam-file from Smart-Prototyping. I think that they are merging both the outline layer (Eagle 20) with the Milling layer (Eagle 46) into the same file.
I haven't found any tool to do the copper/silk masking in the gerbers. I'm sure there are tools for that but they probably only exists in some nice and expensive gerber editing packages. A toggle option would be very cool to have.
A keystroke for toggling the board aligned flat front- and flat backside would also be very useful. It's so hard to flip the board to the backside keeping it aligned to get a straight screenshot.
The lack of anti-aliasing must be due to my old drivers, all the files are straight from the zip. I'll try to change the .conf file and see what happens.
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Tools of the trade / Re: 3D Gerber Viewer
It would be incredibly cool if during the compositing of copper, soldermask and silk you could remove silk that is on top of bare substrate or bare copper like the pcb fabs does. It of course won't be true representation of the gerbers, but it would be truer to the actual pcb.
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Project logs / Re: "Diolan Plus" bootloader.
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Bus Pirate Support / Re: HELP! Wheelchair Joystick with MISO and MOSI
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Bus Pirate Support / Re: HELP! Wheelchair Joystick with MISO and MOSI
You should concentrate on the other pads that are connected to thin tracks, thy might be data or control signals. Do some tracing on the pcb and see where they end up. Checking the signals with an oscilloscope (or even a soundcard) should help a bit in determining what they are.
But if there are separate "modules" I.E pcbs you should concentrate on the wiring between them.
If everything is on a single PCB then there's a big risk that there are no modules that communicate, just a microcontroller turning on and off LEDs depending on the battery voltage that is just scaled down to a smaller range with two resistors and connected as an analogue value onto one of the ADC port of the microcontroller. So there might not be any digital signals on buses that you can tap off and analyze with the Bus Pirate. All signalling, communication and stuff is done inside the Mega8, the rest is just analogue and simple on-off signals.