Really awesome to see the first copies out in the field.
Well, truth be told you designed in a killer feature. Your broke out all the GPIO from the USB interface into pads, so for folks doing embedded development you just delivered a really interesting upgrade to the dev board.
I’ve said before I’d buy some standalone, and that remains true.
Yes, this. You don’t have to price them at a level that eats into your supply for jackpot boards with no benefit to you. Price them such that it actually could contribute meaningfully to your bottom line.
I’m not offended, for example, to spend $25 on a specially equipped development and test asset, unlike if I were just buying a ‘cheap as possible throwaway embedded controller’.
I want some just to do stupid things I do with esps, but have my buddies logo on them. Take care of your jackpot stock first. Then set the price high enough to justify selling the extras. People buy stickers and mugs and tshirts with your name on them. Why not microcontrollers? But none of your fans want you to lose money.
Zen master always speaking my language. I think I can do $10 if the next batch comes out good. That will match espressif and hopefully it makes more sense if you need end mills or something as well to help with shipping. Maybe $10.50 if there are any duds in the batch.
P.S. I added that sexy little soldermask logo to the top of the Jackpot. Jono was right that looks so good on a big copper plane. Set the stage for some other Jackpot options…
The LED’s are much better now. Still bright but not ready to burn out a retina. The bottom pads are perfect.
It just occurred to me I can use USB-c connectors on these. I need to remember to do that next time.
The Jackpots got much smaller header holes and look much better as well.
I need to get these in the Shop, hopefully later this evening.
Man those look good! Need to get my hands on a few for sure and turn the ones I have into backup test boards LOL.
I must have missed it along the way but what are the pads on the bottom for? I don’t think I have ever noticed them on any other ESP32. But I may just not be very observant LOL
If you plan on making that change, I’d allow plenty of time for layout and revision. USB-C connectors are a real pain in the ass to route and will require a replacement to the USB-UART chip to do properly.
They’re breaking out some of the extra pins on the USB-UART chip. It has extra GPIO pins that can be controlled by the USB host. They won’t be visible/controllable via the ESP32 (at least not without a connected PC being involved) but they can super useful as a quick/cheap way to provide GPIO to a PC. I’ve used something similar before for test jigs where I wanted something that had the rapid development time and flexibility of being controlled by a PC but didn’t want to put a microcontroller on a board and write an interface for it and deal with that complexity.
Mostly it’s just a bonus feature because adding pads/features to a PCB is free, aside from the design/verification time to do so.
you know you said you never wanted to sell a completely assembled cnc before, but dang it you might as well, you have it all there, just slap it together and put it on a pallet!
Check this out. Turns out JLC has a minimum size. Looks like I need to try a panel of 2, that would use most of the minimum and should save a few more pennies per board.
Yeah, it’s pretty normal to have different options for order quantities and panelization work out differently in weird ways like that. It’s pretty common to have a minimum size for running a board down the pick and place line, so usually you’d panelize it out to meet that size. This is just one of the more extreme examples I’ve seen!
The PCB part of it is so cheap now that I’m not surprised that this is how they would approach it.
Thankfully, that’s one of those things that I just leave to my CM, these days. I’ll give a target minimum and ask if they have any recommendations for quantity. For the aluminium PCBs I do, the parts count is so high that I’m deep into the price breaks on those parts so it’s usually the board cost that controls order count. For one of the others, the entire assembled board is half the price of the custom ordered connectors that get added by hand later, so all order quantities are very strongly controlled by the pricing on those connectors. They come 24 to a tube and MOQ is 10 tubes with the price almost halving at 20 tubes. That makes life a little awkward for the client that needs them because 240 assembled boards (2 connectors per board) is a huge order, quantity wise, but they’re extremely price insensitive, so that needs some creative inventory management locally.
I’m really thankful that Ryan took the suggestion and put in the effort to add these.
It’s a subtle bonus feature, but when these are available on the store I’m going to buy some.
It’s a killer feature if you have test scenarios where you want a host PC or SBC to manipulate the GPIO for closed loop testing.
Word of mouth might make the V1 test enabled ESP32 a niche specialty item in its’ own right. Which is why I keep saying to price them so they make Ryan enough money to be worth selling separately.
Me too.
Did I mention that Marlin runs on these, and with the right expander module you could even conceive of using marlin to run a 3D printer from a jackpot… !!! I have parts on order to test this, just mainly needing free time to finish the proof of concept.
Maybe even Klipper someday if the right issue ever got completed. (There are some famililar characters on that closed Klipper issue)
Thankful you mentioned it. I would have had no idea. The extra couple minutes made me learn how to make pads. It was worth it just for that.
I am going to put them in the shop soon, if you are ordering them for this feature I will need a note since the first batch has the tiny super close pads, batch 2-3 have better oval pads. (should have made them logos…).
