Month: February 2021

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Parts are Finally Arriving

Digikey, Jameco and other companies got a bunch of boxes to me in the last two days so orders are finally moving again.  A couple more packages will go out on Monday, but at this point my inventory of parts should be enough to keep building boards.

Sorry for the delays during the last two weeks but things seem to be in good shape again.  I’m only short of one part but can pull those from boards that are already built/tested if needed.  Quite a few are on order and should be arriving soon from multiple sources.

 

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Falling Behind on Processing Orders

Since the start of 2021, about a third of all orders were placed in the last five days, so I’m running (or have run) out of parts, bare circuit boards and time to build all the boards.  KIM Clone are in particularly high demand for some reason, and I can only build a few of them each day… labor intensive.

I am also running out, or am out, of some parts.  More chips were used in the last week than in the previous four weeks.

So for right now I am trying my best to get orders out the door but it might be a few days for boxes of parts to arrive and roughly a week for some circuit boards to get here.

Sorry, but I’ve never had this kind of frenzy of orders and had no inclination that inventories were going to run out so quickly.  Some orders are for products that are already in stock and I can get those out quickly.

Boards that are currently affected:

  • KIM Clone bare boards – I’ve got two left, and it’ll be about a week before the next shipment arrives.  The manufacturer shows them about 20% complete, so another day or two for completion then shipping is typically three days.
  • KIM Clone I/O boards – All my 65C22s are gone and the distributor has them in stock but my order has not shipped yet.
  • SS-50 motherboards – The Molex connectors are in a box waiting to be picked up from the distributor by USPS.

Bob

 

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Returning to My Real Job Soon

I’ve been on disability since the end of May 2019, but my many doctors have given me the go-ahead to start working my real job from my house, and my employer was very happy to hear I am available again.  Right now it looks like March 1st will be my first day back, although I am working remotely from my house until all my vaccinations are completed and the company decides they want people back in the physical office.  I am very grateful to Checkpoint Systems for basically keeping my job open while I was ill.

So what does that mean for Corsham Technologies?  Well, it will go back to more of a part-time business.  Orders might start being delivered a bit slower and while I plan on upgrades to some existing products, very little new will be produced.  At this point I’ve got a large assortment of boards for KIM-1s, SYMs, AIMs, SS-50 machines and the KIM Clone… there are no other boards that I’m anxious to build, at least not turn into products.  There are a few “it would be fun to make” boards but those will probably just end up on web pages so others can build their own.

A few months ago the doctors gave me a 20% to 40% chance of surviving., but now the leukemia is in remission and I’m anxious to get back to work again.  Our two kids are both in college now so having a full salary again will be very much appreciated 😉  The doctors are still carefully monitoring my progress and looking for any signs of trouble but I am feeling great and want to do some cutting edge development again.

For those who are interested, I was hired as a Principal Firmware Engineer to design the base software architecture and lead the development team (technical lead, not management) for this product:

EAS-NEO

There is a lot of cool technology inside the rather slim cabinet, and the team did an amazing job pulling all the pieces together.  It will be good to be working with them again!