LisaList2

My order has been placed!

Hey guys, I have some somewhat unfortunate news about the LisaFPGA boards.

The process of getting the 50 boards that I ordered ready to be shipped out and sold has been absolutely horrible so far. I've been spending at least 6 hours per day on this for nearly the past month now because of defective/marginal boards and chips, and I'm getting pretty burned out over the entire project because of it. It's taken what was once a fun project that I looked forward to working on every day and has started turning it into something that's really stressful and not fun in the slightest. Before this, I was looking forward to designing the Rev. 4 board, the Lisa motherboard replacement version, and the floppy emulator, but after this experience with the 50 PCBs, it feels like something that I have to do instead of something that I want to do.

JLCPCB has agreed to repair the bad BGA soldering on the 4 defective boards (but a 5th one went bad after more testing and will be a total loss), but everyone I've talked to says that it's very unlikely that they'll cover shipping or tariffs when I return the boards to them. So there's a good chance that repair will cost a lot, and perhaps more than the boards are even worth, making it better to just take a loss on the boards than to send them back to be fixed.

And in addition to the 5 fully-defective boards, there are several boards that have marginal and seemingly out-of-spec SRAM chips that I'm having to modify my design around in order to get things to work properly on all of the boards that I have. Which has been really difficult because it has required me to do a lot of optimizations to the design to maximize speed.

Not to mention the whole debacle involving the fake SCCs that required integrating a SystemVerilog SCC into the design, which exacerbated the speed-related issues because the extra logic makes it even harder to make communications with the marginal chips work.

I hate to do this, but because of both the absurd amount of time that I've had to put into getting these 50 boards going and the lost money on the defective boards, I feel like I have to raise the price on the remaining boards to $350, and even that doesn't really make it feel like it's worth my while. The small amount of profit that I'll make off these is already worth far less than the amount of time that I've had to put into them, and the lost money from the dead ones just makes this even more true. If I could go back a month or two, I don't think I would've even chosen to sell them at all.

Anyone who has already preordered and paid won't be affected because I would feel bad to charge you even more after you already paid, but this will go into effect for any future orders starting now.

I'm really sorry about this, but I just don't feel like there's any way around it. I hope you understand; I know that some people are already upset about the $300 asking price. And this price may be subject to change for future batches (if I even feel like doing them at all after this) depending on how many defective boards there are and how much of my time it takes, especially after school starts back up and I have less time to spend on them to begin with.

Hey Alex,

Sorry to hear about the challenges you are facing with this. I'm sure the whole experience will be a valuable lesson for you in the future so it hopefully won't be a total loss in the long term. Probably hard to see that right now I'm sure though.

I've placed my order but am happy to wait until you are comfortable with the quality. And I'm in Australia so wouldn't want you or I to deal with trying to fix stuff after shipping.

Most should be fairly understanding of your predicament.

Very sorry to hear you going through this!

Please don't get burned out you've done so much for our community, it is immeasurable.

I think a lot of people will be willing to pay extra once they understand what you're going through.

If you were to start a GoFundMe just to help you continue this development. I would certainly pitch in what I could.

I know I would be happy and grateful even at the higher price to get this marvelous piece of technology, knowing that you're compensated for your work and your time in such a way that you do not feel that is a a burden.

Of course, from what I understand, you may even run across more challenges and I hope it doesn't get to the point where you actually have to take a loss.

Please take all the time you need with my order; I already have Lisas, and the later I get my unit, the later I'll be on the hook to make a square-pixel-compatible upgrade to the Selector. In fact, feel free send me the board that has the jankiest SRAM: I already have two of the exact same SRAM part sitting around my lab for a 2 MiB Lisa RAM board that I'll probably never design+build (it was a late-night impulse buy). I'll just whack a replacement in there and move on. It's a soldering challenge suited to my skills.

Now, I don't think I have the skills to do my own BGA rework, but I bet the set of people who can do that and who want one of these things is non-empty. Maybe you can sell the faulty stock as-is at a discount instead of dumping it as a total write-off?

Sorry to hear about this hiccup in what is already a legendary achievement (all carried out while pursuing a doctorate, which is plenty on its own; I should know). Please hang in there and work at a sustainable pace: nobody needs to have one of these things tomorrow, and anyone complaining about the price and the speed of fulfilment is welcome to design their own competing offering.

Very sorry to hear all this. Please don't feel obligated to speedrun this; take all the time you need to fulfill the orders to your satisfaction. I'll be patient. And anyone complaining about the price can suck a lemon.