Fortunately it was a nice old lady down the street who received the boards and she brought them over to me. I now have stock. All you people holding off buying a Bit Rate Converter can place your orders now.

So I guess I’m still out of stock until the next batch arrives :(

They all work. Hooray!

Overall I am happy with the boards and as an added bonus they are now RoHS compliant and look a lot neater than the hand-soldered ones.

There were a few downsides with the process though, the main one being the length of time it took to get it all happening. I’ve had delays and issues from just about everyone I have dealt with – DigiKey with their dumb export restrictions, FedEx taking foreeever to deliver stuff, Gold Phoenix for forgetting about the job until I reminded them a few times, PayPal for stuffing up my payments and sitting on my money for two weeks while the Aussie dollar went down and I lost out on the FX conversion… after all was said and done it took almost two months to make this happen and in the meantime I had run out of stock which is always embarassing.

In summary, I definitely think that offshore manufacturing can work for me but I’ll need to take all these delays into account and be organized well in advance the next time around.

The biggest problem so far has been sourcing the parts. I’m getting most of the stuff from DigiKey because they specialize in smaller orders – I don’t have the sales volume to justify making 1000 of these things.

But get this. DigiKey will not deliver microprocessors to China, because of export restrictions, for a microprocessor that was made in China in the first place!

Ah well, I found MCUZONE, a Chinese supplier for the microprocessors thanks to the very excellent alibaba.com so I have all the parts on their way now.

So stay tuned, I’ll post photos when I get the assembled boards back from China.

Another reason I never redesigned it for AVR is that the economics are not that great. It would probably take $5 off the price but cost me a couple of weeks of time to redesign the entire thing.

This decision has had an unexpected benefit recently. A customer asked me if I could add an extra function to search-and-replace byte sequences in the data stream. Now I’m really glad to have 50 MIPS on board because a smaller CPU might not have had the grunt to do the job.

So having a way-too-powerful CPU has produced a long-term benefit to enable me to quickly sieze a market opportunity.

Next I need to set up a web page and finalize pricing so anyone can buy one.

So what is a Volume Box I hear you ask? Well, the Volume Box is a digital stereo volume control. It has no knobs or buttons, it is controlled via serial commands from a PC or home automation system. It is intended to be used as a component in an automated audiovisual setup such as conference centres, classrooms etc.

Features include:

• Attenuation from 0 to -95dB in 1dB steps
• 3 way stereo input selector
• Line level inputs and outputs
• Optional 7 watt power amplifier
• Mute function
• Preset store and recall

Here are the lessons I have learned:

1. PICs can be a mighty pain in the bum to debug, particularly the peripherals. I think I’ll use a different chip next time.

2. Always check your component footprints when designing a PCB, the Protel footprint libraries are full of errors. I’ll be patching the first run of boards due to a bad footprint.

3. Don’t try to get a product out the door around Christmas time, many manufacturing companies are closed for the holidays especially here in Australia where we combine our summer holiday and Christmas holiday into one big long holiday. Some companies do not resume business until January 18th!

Anyway, now the design is proven I have ordered some parts to begin producing these things.

My chips and other parts have already arrived so next I need to assemble it and test. I’ve still got a lot of tasks after that before it is a finished product such as designing the end panels of the box, writing the user manual and setting up a website for it.