Product Idea: USB Flash Drives

[barray]

The only, small difference is that Pine64 surely doesn't use fine-tip tweezers to perform component placement manually.

Ha! I'm sure some of the production is still more manual than you would hope, especially given the production numbers we're talking about...

I would prefer not to disclose more details publicly, at this moment, although there's actually nothing to hide.

(Confused Pikachu face) Okay, will be interested when you have more details to reveal

You're right about the cheap pick-and-place machines, they are usually not of high quality, and most of them either do not support high density of components, or cannot handle bigger components.  However, I'd consider buying one only if the sales volume outgrows the "handmade" production, which would be a good problem to have.

I think offloading this problem to somebody like JLPCB is quite viable anyway, especially if you source the parts and send them to them - it could end up being quite low cost too. I suppose the only time it's not such a great option is when you are working on something you are trying to keep under-wraps, like a commercial project.

By the way, my primary goal is not to make a lot of money.  Sure, some money has to be made in order to keep the whole operation afloat, but my primary motivation is to make open devices available to anyone interested in buying, using and tweaking such devices.

I think you should actually look to make some money anyway, even if it just sits in a pot. You're going to need some float cash to expand operations and deal with random crap, like parcels going missing or things like this.

Speaking of which, it's quite likely we could setup a Tindie page to deal with buy/sell, hopefully they support backorder on there.

In other news, some interesting numbers for eMMc vs SD in the PienPhone (and likely all other A64 devices): https://xnux.eu/log/#032 In theory we just need to beat these numbers in order for our solution to be viable, which seems quite possible.