You’ve spent months developing your product, your Kickstarter just finished successfully, and now you’re ready to order all the parts. Unfortunately, your main component, an ATmega328P, is out of stock everywhere with a manufacturer lead time of 16 weeks. Now what?

When manufacturing things in large volumes, acquiring enough stock at the right time can be tricky. There can be seasonal shortages with companies trying to get products manufactured and available for Christmas. There can be natural disasters like floods of hard drive factories, or politically-related availability problems like tantalum for capacitors, or maybe new markets open up that increase demand or a new product sucks up all the available supply. The result is all the same; you have a harder time getting what you need. Fortunately, there are some ways to avoid this problem, or at least mitigate it.

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