Hi GunterO,
Thanks for reaching out. We’ll contact you to confirm.
Modded my board just fine today, all the other images in this thread were very helpful.
Am fortunate to be a 2014 “graduate” of a dodgy cell phone soldering school in SZ so my hot air techniques are bolder than they used to be.
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Hey @TomKeddie!
Looks like a good fix! Thank you for sharing. Thank you also for spotting the redirect error on www.
Was that really 10 years ago?! I may need a refresher course 
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Hey Ian, I use this youtube video as my anchor, everything else is a blur. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQjV2APK9zQ
Am due for a refresher for sure.
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Kudos for managing that. I tried for too long but couldn’t get the chip to sit flat enough for my OCD.
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The Shenzhen office is back since yesterday. Things are moving again.
Right before spring festival started, @Jin found spare capacity at the prototype assembler to make enough boards to ship all the then-existing orders before the holiday started. Then, we thought the first step in scaling at the volume production factory would clear any orders from during Spring Festival.
For a number of reasons that is no longer the plan. We’re going to push through 2 batches in the biggest size the proto assembler will take (in negotiation). This should be fairly quick turn (We’ll see!) and will go immediately to pre-holiday orders.
At the same time, we’re going to probably end up doing a scary number for a first run with the volume assembler. I prefer to scale a bit slower, but we’ll hash out the details with the boss at a meeting tomorrow when he’s back from holiday.
Cables and stuff are also in progress or ready to ship. They’re just cables with extra steps, and we’ve been doing that kind of stuff for years. That seems to be running smoothly.
Thanks for hanging in there! I can’t wait to get these shipped.
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Woohoo! Assembled, tested Bus Pirates arrived at our office this morning. We’re boxing them up and shipping as fast as we can. A bunch will ship today, more tomorrow. The backlog will be cleared by next week.
Thanks for hanging in there. I made 100 REV8 preview boards and it took ~3-4 months to sell them. Almost nobody bought a probe cable or aux cable. We thought we were well prepared for launch and would coast through the 2 week spring festival. Instead, we are doing an initial batch of 1000s.
We’re a team of 5, with 2 in the Shenzhen office. We’ve outsourced absolutely everything we could to speed things up. I paid emergency and rush fees every time it was an option. We’ve hired in an army of temp workers to help with the packaging and shipment. I’m super proud & thankful for @Jin, Jam, Bing and Lynn going above and beyond to get this huge batch of intricately sourced hardware out less than three weeks after the Chinese Spring Festival.
Thank you for checking out the Bus Pirate. I’m sorry for the delay, but I’m super excited to ship and hear what you think of the project.
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We shipped all day. It was such a frantic effort that there are no photos. A’ Bing accidentally set the wrong order status when printing a batch of shipping labels, so some people got a balance due email by mistake. We’re super sorry about that.
A’ Bing is doing quality control on 100% of the final assembly Bus Pirate coming from the factory. They were tested at the factory, but we want to be absolutely sure. There are a couple Bus Pirates with broken buttons. The factory politely blamed my enclosure, and fair enough, it’s poorly designed, but we’ve assembled several hundred in-house for initial batches and this was never an issue.
The factory built some sort of rig (awaiting photo) to hold the enclosure so they can use auto screw feeders and “hang from the ceiling” screw drivers to speed assembly. My suspicion is something is happening there. What surprises me, due to my amateur injection molding attempt, is that the case is basically a tank. The PCB is sandwiched really well, and it’s a huge block of plastic. Over torquing the bolts would pull the embedded nuts out before it would crush the button cap onto the button. These all went back to PCBA for analysis because we’re too busy shipping to look into it ourselves.
Failure rate post-production (before final assembly) was less than 1%, and they reworked most of those. There seems to be a lot of reflow issues with the SI2301 P-FET in SOT-523. I’ve asked them to retain the components to send for analysis, but it’s unclear to me at this point if that actually happened. We have a good relationship with the supplier, CBI, so I’d really really think it would be interesting to poke around there a bit and find out whats going on.
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Another full day of shipping. I need to do some tweaks to the shipping system because orders with more than 4 items have to be manually entered into the logistics system. The new special lines are great, it’s the stuff (maybe even same company) Aliexpress and Temu are using. However, each destination has undocumented API limitations that we only find out about by bumping up against them.
This is the assembly rig the factory made. The factory has moved from blaming the case to blaming the button quality for the failures. The broken buttons will go to ShuoHan for analysis before we use any more of them. We’re coming up with alternates, but ShuoHan seems confident their engineer will have a fast solution.
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Received the replacement board today in NL already! It was sent 6/7 days ago from China.
Thanks for the great service!
Glad it arrived! Shipping is super fast right now.
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Can’t wait for the new probe cable set to arrive!
Sadly I must admit that I would also need a replacement board…
I tried to fix Q402 and I ripped off the pads underneat 
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Nice attempt though, these packages are tiny!
We’ll send a new board.
Thanks. I will give this broken one to hackerspace. I’ve heard they have some skilled ones. Maybe its possible to scratch here and there and still fix it. I will ask them asap if they are interested…
Edit: Yes they are interested and will try to further fix/break it.
Also @ian what will be in the replacement package? So I know what I can give away.
You’ll probably get a replacement PCB without enclosure from the engineering test samples we made last week. I had two made to test the panels before we started production of another batch. They’re really nice.
Seems fine. So I will give away only pcb then.
Give away the enclosure too! We sent you a new enclosure from a new batch of injection molding. The inside part of the enclosure is smoothed out and has a matte finish.
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Just got mine! How do I check which PCB rev it is without opening the case?
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If it’s in a case, it’s REV10.