Month: February 2022

Lots of parts are unavailable from good distributors at this point, so I am being forced to go to black-market devices, and not everything is available even there.  Right now it looks like the connectors used on all the prototyping boards are gone until maybe late March through late May.  That is not good.

At my full-time job most of my time is dedicated to taking code from processors we can not longer get and porting to several other chips, hoping to get any of them in the quantities we need to continue production.  I spend hours a week talking directly to chip manufacturers trying to see if we can get anything in large quantities for the near future, usually with no luck.  One large company told us they are not accepting any new customers because they cannot even provide enough chips to existing customers!

 

I was fortunate to get a very large order for a lot of KIM Clones for a college to aid in a course they are doing around the 6502 processor.  Classes were about to start so their order took priority and consumed quite a bit of my parts inventory and time.  After a few weeks of parts shipments and many evenings working, all of the KIM Clones were shipped and students have their own boards to work with.

Now I am back to working on all the back-orders, so things will start flowing again.  Today I’ve prepared three boxes for shipment and will have yet another later in the day.  I have also found other sources of parts that seem to be reliable; it’s always good to have more sources for parts during these times of parts shortages.

In terms of shows for this year, I will sit out events until my medical team says it is okay to be in crowds again.  I miss not seeing people but my health is higher priority still.