Papilio DUO Kickstarter - Feedback request!


Jack Gassett

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Marek has raised an interesting question on the KS, about shipping to the EU: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/13588168/papilio-duo-drag-and-drop-fpga-circuit-lab-for-mak/comments

 

I have the same concerns about the UK. Are you going to look for a Europe/UK based fulfilment partner so that shipping here is completely local? It'd be greatly appreciated, but I'd know nothing of the costs/difficulty of setting something like that up.

 

Unfortunately I don't have anything like that in place and I don't have the resources to make something like that happen. It's expensive, I've looked into using Amazon for local delivery in Europe and it was cost prohibitive. 

 

I'm a bit confused by that. If you import it you don't pay US sales tax but you pay your local sales tax (vat) instead. That doesn't change whether it's bulk imported, imported by a company or anything else. Doing a bulk import might save on shipping (unless the courier loses the whole batch ;-) ) and slightly on processing costs but the sales taxes don't go away.

 

By the time you've factored in the cost of repackaging and local reshipping I imagine it wouldn't actually save much at all.

 

Alan

 

Exactly, someone has to pay the import duties, if I set up a method of shipping from inside Europe it just shifts who pays the import duties. I would have to pay when I bulk imported all the boards and then I would have to pay for the service to ship within Europe. Right now I'm collecting enough fees to cover International shipping costs but it is not nearly enough to pay import duties, setup a European shipping center, and pay local shipping fees.

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Unfortunately I don't have anything like that in place and I don't have the resources to make something like that happen. It's expensive, I've looked into using Amazon for local delivery in Europe and it was cost prohibitive. 

 

 

Exactly, someone has to pay the import duties, if I set up a method of shipping from inside Europe it just shifts who pays the import duties. I would have to pay when I bulk imported all the boards and then I would have to pay for the service to ship within Europe. Right now I'm collecting enough fees to cover International shipping costs but it is not nearly enough to pay import duties, setup a European shipping center, and pay local shipping fees.

 

Would have been nice to get VAT pre-paid to avoid things being held up at the postal depot and slapped with "handling fees", but it's not something you can "just do" and I'm 500% sure that you have enough to be worrying about as it is without us whining foreigners on your hands!

 

Edit: Also, congrats on breaking $20k! You're on the home straight now! ( Although you still actually have to make, ship, program, support... I don't think people appreciate quite how much effort you have to put into this!  Thank you! )

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Yeah the problem isn't duties and VAT, it's the fact that the delivery (well I object to those too, but that's a different issue). The issue is the additional fee that the delivery companies charge for collecting that from me. I'm sure I have no legal requirement to pay them for a "service" I never requested from them but it's not always that easy. it's not a problem though, I'll complain and pay it if I have to :)

Anyway kickstarter is looking good :) I wanted an HDMI port and I'm not sure it will reach the goal for that, but I guess it's not that hard to make a board myself if I have to :)

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Just dropping by to say hello as a new papilio member, well will be soon when I get my duo.

 

I'm only familiar with Quartus and Altera but the reason I started to look into FPGAs to begin with, was because my scope has 3 spartan 6 two for processing the analog inputs and one for driving the display. Sure they are bigger than 9K logic cells but I think it's time for me to learn the Xilinx toolchain as well (how different can it be?)

 

I'm very excited about this KS, actually is the first thing that motivated me to actually join KS.

 

The reason I signed up to the forum was to thanks DanC for his awesome pinout diagram, and of course to thank Jack and the rest of you for everything else.

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The PI is produced in Europe (not far from here at the Sony factory in Pencoed). Only decent Sony product I have ;-)

I had heard of "China" before but never realized it's a Dutch village :)

Well, that's what the box says, at least.

 

BTW, before anybody reads this wrong: My Papilio and the Pi are best friends...

The Pi is perfect for quick-and-dirty software development, controlling the FPGA: With an SPI connection through a simple five-wire ribbon cable I get 400 kBytes / second, so it's fairly easy to implement just about any software controls for prototyping code that is ultimately meant for the soft-CPU on the FPGA.

The same trick will work of course also on the Duo.

 

>> Sure they are bigger than 9K logic cells

If you want my opinion, get a small / cheap / friendly FPGA board to start with. Upgrading later from LX9 up to LX75 is straightforward. I'v'e got a couple of bigger boards, but they are usually less convenient to work with (down to "complete PITA" when re-flashing an FMC carrier S6 takes 8 minutes or more).

By unspoken agreement between vendors, the "pro" boards also have a 12 V 5+ amps wire hidden somewhere in a high density connector that lets out the magic smoke if an oscilloscope probe slips.

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(not far from here at the Sony factory in Pencoed)

 

Oh, how I miss Wales...

Anyway, I think assembling the boards in Europe would not be profitable - it can be acceptable for huge quantities, but not for the Papilio figures. For example, I had a few boards assembled near where I live, with only a few parts (about 30 SMD). For seven boards, I had to pay almost €20 for the assembly (for each board). Each PCB cost €13 (roughly same size of the Papilio). Luckily, this was not for a commercial product. Oh, and add VAT to it (23% at the time).

From my experience, it would be even more expensive in UK. But might be wrong....

 

Alvie

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Yep I would think so - its also much harder to set up because a lot of the parts aren't so easily available. Shenzen is a very unique place where you can just walk down the road and buy 10,000 resistor trees or 5000 ethernet chips.

 

Genuine PIs were almost all made in Wales however. Lots of the clones are China build.

 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/electronics-weekly-visits-the-pi-factory-video/

 

and you can watch the movie..

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