A few weeks ago we held a pre-order for the Bus Pirate V2go, the first official Hack a Day hardware. We had initially hoped for a group purchase of 20 or 40 Bus Pirates, maybe 200 if it was extremely popular. In total, nearly a thousand Bus Pirates will be made.
The first 350 Bus Pirates (pre-order 1) have already been manufactured and tested. Seeed Studio has done a great job handling the orders, pre-order 1 should start shipping more than a week early. How long will it take to get to your mail box? It will vary for everyone, but our packages usually arrive from Seeed in 7 days.
Seeed sent us pictures of the Bus Pirate depaneling, programming, and quality control process. Check them out after the break.
A panel of Bus Pirates.
Depaneling, also known as cutting a big sheet into individual circuit boards.
Visual inspection of each Bus Pirate.
Programming the unified bootloader/V0g firmware via the ICSP header.
Testing the bootloader and terminal interface after programming the firmware.
Completed Bus Pirates are stored on anti-static foam, we like the shiny quality control stickers.
Individual Bus Pirates are cut out for packaging.
Finished Bus Pirate packaged in an anti-static bag.
A box of Bus Pirates ready for handling.
One Bus Pirate, ready to ship. This might be be yours.
Great, now when does preorder 2 ship?
For one, I see a distinct lack of mounting holes. Maybe they could leave that little edge strip with a mounting hole on?
And since 1000 where pre-ordered at the same time, a drop in price?
Is there a prize if that is mine?
very nice ESD protection there – no wrist straps needed I suppose
Love pile of Bus Pirate’s on the desk in the testing picture!
got a shipping confirm this morning…
when will preorder 3 open?
i agree mount hole would be nice.
I don’t have much to offer… but if someone can prove that’s their Bus Pirate package, I’ll send a random PCB from my lab.
I have a feeling it’s actually mine, but I can ask Seeed to be sure.
great job ian & co. I’m looking forward to mine!
@ian You’d be able to get close since the tracking number isn’t obscured on that image.
07/16/2009 Shipped
Yea, getting mine soon. 7 days? then I’m back from vacation…
:D
What I would like to see is more articles on the pirate, I enjoyed those, I realise there is no incentive left for you to do that since we have already paid but if you decide to then that would be appreciated I think.
XD
RAxxxxxxxxxHK is mine…
so mine is on that pile somewhere
not in the bag.
taking mine to har2009
@Kaya Ozalp
Actually you never see both of their wrists at any time, so they might be wearing them. Also you can be grounded with heal straps and ankle straps.
Now how about some prebuilt cliplead cables?
@Kaya Ozalp
they maybe have antistatic floors?
Looks great – can’t wait for mine :-)
Shouldn’t be too hard to mount – there’s enough space on the bottom of the borad for some double-sided foam tape to fix them down.
Some suggestions as to a good place to get the micro clips would be good. I understand why they aren’t packed in – too many people with their own needs. The small clips that fit smt parts are expensive, the normal .25″ compatible clips won’t suit everyone, etc.
It would have been good to have the option of a wiring loom – where we get a nice cabled tail, and could add our own clis at the end. Maybe the next round :-)
@slincolne
DigiKey has a set of 10 for a little over $25
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&name=461-1012-ND
you should get some boards made in the US so we can populate them ourselves and won’t have to wait weeks.
Is there any chance you will open more pre-orders and manufacture more of these? I missed the previous announcements but I would still be interested on getting one!
Those look more like static dissipative bags than anti-static bags. See this for more info, discussion starts at 3:30
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLJOI9HC-tQ
(not that I really care, this is all cool stuff! re: my above comment about anti-static bags)
@LordSpacehog
Do you happen to know the part number of the sockets that match those micro pincers?
@dre we’ll consider more orders once the preorder 2 batch starts shipping.
Deal Extreme has the clips in 10 packs for under $3.00 USD
When will preorder 3 open?
Burn!! Ain’t success a pain? ;^)
Awaiting arrival, thanks.
when will 2 ship?
Shiver me timbers! Mine is on da way. Should have it tomorrow or Saturday, coming to Jakarta via DHL. I have a misbehaving MAX7219 SPI driver that wanna make love to Bus Pirate.
Hi Ian, is there possible you will launch a third pre-orders of this great tool? I was not here for a long time, and I am really interested on getting one piece!
Thanks a lot!
We have to finish the first two pre-orders before we can consider more. The second pre-order had such a long and loose lead time estimate because there’s nowhere to get 700 PIC24FJ64GA002-I/SO right now. It looks like Microchip is starting new production and more chips will be ready soon. We’ll have an update on pre-order 2 next week.
This is pure speculation, but there’s a revision 4 of the 24FJ64 coming that corrects the broken hardware I2C module, the switch to the updated chip might explain the current shortage. A Microchip engineer mentioned that he already had R4 silicon this spring. Again, pure speculation.
If pre-order 2 gets an R4 chip, then those lucky Bus Pirates can do some hardware I2C stuff that we couldn’t implement before because of the faulty I2C hardware in R3.
Call me selfish, but I hope they don’t get a better chip than us in the first wave :)
@tikka
secretly I agree… Or a free upgrade kit…XD
Yo seria otro de los que se apuntaria a la Preorder III.
Esta no se me escapa.
Saludos.
@dan they are just the hooks, all you need to do is solder or crimp a wire to em from the ribbon cable and you are done.
again, all i want is a circuit board so i can build it myself…
@jake – Contact me and I’ll send you a PCB.
sent, thanks!
@Ian Lesnet
im willing to wait (im on preorder 2) for the new chip … i bought this for i2c stuff
can it do parallel?
when will a new batch be built, I’ve been looking for a while and both preorder 1 and 2 are full
I’m tempted to put mine up on ebay as I haven’t had/got the time to use it.
My pre-order 2 has been sitting on my desk for a while now, I’ve plugged it into a couple systems and failed to get anywhere with a serial console. The “mode” light was lit, though the documentation indicated that it should not be lit before selecting a mode in the firmware.
Today I finally wasted about two hours figuring it out. Apparently, it came without any firmware loaded, and I needed to “just know” to go upload firmware to my device. What exactly the “QA passed” sticker on the bottom means… I’m not sure.
Anyway, anyone else who got a preorder 2, you need to go to buspirate.com (Didn’t know that existed until now) and there is other info at dangerousprototypes.com.
-Jonathan