inches wrote: ↑Tue Nov 28, 2017 10:15 am
Hi guys,
I hadn't been getting notifications about your responses here. I apologise for not responding sooner.
I had gotten very busy with a summer job and waiting on parts. My enthusiasm died down, and for a while nobody was asking about the project. The job was a lot of stress and I ended up in the ER. When I finished out the summer and tried to solder again, my visual focus had declined and my hands were not nearly as steady as they had been.
I believed that the number of interested pre-orders wasn't going to be reflective of the number of sales I'd actually get. Since there's absolutely no way to hand solder the SODIMM slots past one or two, they need to be manufactured and assembled overseas, which requires a large order. I've been having a lot of difficulty iterating on the boards because of how hard it to to diagnose issues with the soldering of the SODIMM slot versus the board itself.
The number of alleged purchases was already fairly low. I wouldn't be making much money from the efforts I had put into it, what was still necessary, and the risk that I'd be taking on. It was a learning project from the get go, not necessarily a concerted business effort, and I felt like I'd learned a lot of circuit design from what I'd done so far.
It was a slow death of the project for me, which is why there was never a point where I came out and said it was officially over. I never really felt it was over, just paused indefinitely. But with the excitement over the GBA CM build, and Kite's SAIO boards with the CM, I felt like my product was filling an ever decreasing space in the market.
These all seem like excuses to me now that I reread them though. I'd love to be convinced otherwise.
How many of you are still looking for a CEMU, or have boards waiting for one already?
Anybody have suggestions about how to get around the fact that I cannot accurately solder the prototypes myself anymore?
I still have quite a lot of parts, boards, and other necessary equipment that seems to be going to waste. The first board worked, but I thought it was too big to fit well inside and that people wouldn't like that. After I did the redesign I couldn't get the new boards soldered well enough to test them.