Next build of riffles

[Patrick Hixenbaugh]

Greetings everyone,

I'm preparing a poster presentation on the riffle and open water quality monitoring, and doing so raised the question, "What can people do who are interested in this?"

I predict that some people are happy digging into the website and learning about the development.

For people who want to get started with a riffle as soon as possible, at what number of orders does a group order of riffles make sense? Is there a mechanism for people at this stage to indicate their interest in being in the next group order, and would that be useful?

Meta - Maybe this could also be a question in the new Q&A system on the website (?)

Cheers,
Patrick

[Mathew Lippincott]

Patrick--

While we aren't going to commercial scale with the current Riffle design, we can facilitate an at-cost bulk purchase of the Riffle as-is for anyone interested.  They won't arrived flashed or with accessories like batteries.

We have the boards ready to order from the manufacturer Macrofab, and they'll let us order small quantities.  They are ~$60 each in quantities of 10 or less + shipping.  ~$21 each for 50 or more. 

Mathew

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[Patrick Hixenbaugh]

Thank you - that is great information.

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[Chris Fastie]

Patrick,

Another option is to make your own Riffles. Don has produced a circuit design for a through hole version of the Riffle which can be ordered in small quantities for under $5 apiece. You then must purchase and solder on all of the components. I don't know how much the components would cost, but it might be less than $50 per Riffle (Don, have you added up the BOM costs?). The repository for this version is https://github.com/p-v-o-s/mowgli-mem

Chris

[Don Blair]

Ah, cool that the Riffle_328 is only $21 ea in batches of 50!  

@Patrick, to elaborate on the 'flash' issue that Mathew mentioned -- in order for the Riffles to be useful, you first need to load a bootloader onto the board, which can't be done via USB, but instead requires a special cable -- e.g. this one https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9825 -- and a 'bootloader' file.  If you go ahead with organizing this, I can help with the instructions for doing that.

@Mathew, do you know if MacroFab was able to source their own CH340 USB-Serial chips?  For the last run, I think they were using the last of a batch I'd sent them via Rui ... 

@Chris, thank you for pointing to the Mowgli :)  I wouldn't really yet recommend that anyone try building it yet, as the design is still unfinished and might not work at all.  But it might soon!  When I tallied up the price using OSHPark for the PCBs and Digikey for the parts, it was about $15 in parts per board.  Not clear yet that the EEPROM works nicely for datalogging; you'd need also need a ~ $15 FTDI cable to program it.   

[Patrick Hixenbaugh]

Glad to see the discussion that's coming from this. At this point I'm interested in putting some of this up on the wiki in a "what to do if you want a riffle" section, and facilitating a group order -- either for the riffle_328 as-is, or as a waitinglist for the next release if there's enough interest. And crossing those bridges when we get there.

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Patrick Hixenbaugh
University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 2014.

Chemistry / Environmental Science

240-242-7449

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[Mathew Lippincott]

I don't know about the CH340-- I thought they had a number there... will have to double check with macrofab.

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Patrick Hixenbaugh
University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 2014.

Chemistry / Environmental Science

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https://publiclab.org/profile/pdhixenbaugh

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[Tobias Lunt]

As a newcomer to the riffle and Public Lab in general, I can say that a “what to do if you want a riffle” page on the wiki would be super helpful!

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[Patrick Hixenbaugh]

Hi all,

**Asking for comments** https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1oioTVpb17ImdFfxKFAnA9PzjVHuRrkDb4Bft7-0sEak/edit

I drafted an order interest form, based off of the last Riffle Beta form. Can interested folks look at this and suggest improvements? I'd like to send the finished one through the list, and add the form to the wiki sometime next week.

Right now I'm curious to see what the initial interest is, and base the next move on that.

Side note: how much are those blue Lithium Ion batteries, that came with the Riffle Beta?

On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 3:54 AM, Tobias Lunt <toby...@gmail.com> wrote:

As a newcomer to the riffle and Public Lab in general, I can say that a “what to do if you want a riffle” page on the wiki would be super helpful!

On Sep 29, 2016, at 10:17 PM, Patrick Hixenbaugh <patrick.h...@gmail.com> wrote:

Glad to see the discussion that's coming from this. At this point I'm interested in putting some of this up on the wiki in a "what to do if you want a riffle" section, and facilitating a group order -- either for the riffle_328 as-is, or as a waitinglist for the next release if there's enough interest. And crossing those bridges when we get there.

On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 2:33 PM, Don Blair <donb...@pvos.org> wrote:

Ah, cool that the Riffle_328 is only $21 ea in batches of 50!  

@Patrick, to elaborate on the 'flash' issue that Mathew mentioned -- in order for the Riffles to be useful, you first need to load a bootloader onto the board, which can't be done via USB, but instead requires a special cable -- e.g. this one https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9825 -- and a 'bootloader' file.  If you go ahead with organizing this, I can help with the instructions for doing that.

@Mathew, do you know if MacroFab was able to source their own CH340 USB-Serial chips?  For the last run, I think they were using the last of a batch I'd sent them via Rui ... 

@Chris, thank you for pointing to the Mowgli :)  I wouldn't really yet recommend that anyone try building it yet, as the design is still unfinished and might not work at all.  But it might soon!  When I tallied up the price using OSHPark for the PCBs and Digikey for the parts, it was about $15 in parts per board.  Not clear yet that the EEPROM works nicely for datalogging; you'd need also need a ~ $15 FTDI cable to program it.   

On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 2:05 PM, Chris Fastie <cfa...@gmail.com> wrote:

Patrick,

Another option is to make your own Riffles. Don has produced a circuit design for a through hole version of the Riffle which can be ordered in small quantities for under $5 apiece. You then must purchase and solder on all of the components. I don't know how much the components would cost, but it might be less than $50 per Riffle (Don, have you added up the BOM costs?). The repository for this version is https://github.com/p-v-o-s/mowgli-mem

Chris

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[Don Blair]

Hi Patrick,

Super cool!  

Here's a link to the battery that came with the Riffle Beta:  https://www.adafruit.com/products/1781 -- it's $10.  Note that any 3.7 V lithium ion battery with the same connector -- which is most of the batteries on the Adafruit site -- would also work (but might not fit through a bottle mouth, depending on the size / shape :))

[Patrick Hixenbaugh]

Hey all,

Just added the "how to get a riffle" section to the wiki. Check it out: https://i.publiclab.org/wiki/riffle

[Patrick Hixenbaugh]

Hi all,

Following up on the Riffle order, there are 7 responses so far. We had one big request for 50 riffles at the $20 price point!!! Along with the other 6 responses, we have a big enough order to hit the ~$21 price point.

So where do we go from here?

* Do we start taking orders, publicize it, and set a deadline?

* Figure out international shipping? Will Macrofab send to multiple addresses or to one address? Will that raise the price significantly? (I'm hoping to learn more about this)

* Should we facilitate a group order for some of the accessories to get lower prices on those (e.g. microSD cards and lithium batteries)

* Organize volunteers to install the bootloader on batches of riffles, and post them out to their final destinations, so not everybody needs to invest in the $15 cable?

Are there any loose ends we need to tie up first? E.g. email folks and ask them if they're prepared to pre-order a big batch of riffles (also I'm curious about what that 50 riffle project will look like!)...

Curious to see what the public lab order experts have to say about this!

Exciting times!

Patrick

P.S. The order form is here (and also linked on the Riffle wiki) : https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1oioTVpb17ImdFfxKFAnA9PzjVHuRrkDb4Bft7-0sEak

[Liz Barry]

Hi Patrick, 

Great! Really appreciating your contributions on behalf of this group!

Mathew and I communicated about two first steps --

1. Arranging payment from individual respondents, beginning with the person who has the large bulk order of 50, after which we can set the price for everyone else, and proceed to placing an order through Macrofab. 
2. simultaneously, Public Lab Kits can start sourcing the CH340 chips to send to Macrofab (will consult with Don Blair on this)

About receiving the Riffle shipment from Macrofab: Macrofab will make a single shipment to a single destination. If we receive the order in our Kits dept, we can then ship directly to individuals (taking advantage of PL's slightly lower cost mailings as a non-profit), or if you'd like we can send the Macrofab order somewhere else if volunteers want to handle shipping. 

About the bootloader: the Public Lab's Kits dept could approach this a couple ways: 

• Minimal: hit the at-cost price point with bootloader-less Riffles without batteries and SD cards. (this is PL Kit's preferred option, since it doesn't take much work).
• Full prep: PL Kits can load bootloaders onto the riffles for some small fee, ~$5 a board. We also have SD cards and batteries in our office. We could throw them in for an additional $15, but can't ship batteries internationally.

.....

So, Patrick, what do you think of the above, and does it make sense that PL Kits begin contacting the respondents now?

thanks!

Liz

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[Patrick Hixenbaugh]

Thank you both for making this possible at all!

Gut reaction is - could full prep be optional?

If a ~$5 board prep is an option, that would be a great benefit for many people with smaller orders, and save a lot of people from buying a cable just for this purpose.

On the other hand, folks with big orders might be able to save $5/ board by doing it themselves, which would be a win-win for kits since it saves time for other projects.

Making it optional could provide the benefit and cut the workload.

If we go the optional route, perhaps buying the sd card and battery could also be optional. However if it's easiest for kits to prepare all the riffle orders with the same contents though, everyone on the form was prepared to source their own sd card and battery.

Questions I have before going forward:
1. Is Don working on a future version of the riffle - how far away is that? Would it need to have a big order placed as well?

2. Once the big orders are in, when should the order be placed? To give enough time for other people to jump in at the lower price if they'd like to?

3. This could be a chance to spread the word about public lab and the riffle to people/organizations who may not have heard of it yet. Have you ever tried a "help us get the word out: refer X people, we'll give you Y as thanks" scheme? Where Y could be anything from public lab goodies to an optional special mention somewhere. This might not be the time for that, but it's an idea.

Thanks!
Patrick

[Liz Barry]

Great questions Patrick, Thank you, we're working on them, and in the meantime i'm copying Abdul of the Kits Department in. 

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[Don Blair]

Hi Patrick, All,

Just wanted to quickly reply in this thread with:  this is fantastic.  Amazing that you're organizing this!  

@Patrick -- I've dabbled with making an updated version of the Riffle, but at this point there's nothing that's tested --  a new, tested version would be at a few months away, on my end.  Of course, others should feel free to make the modifications they like, and beat me to it!  E.g. removing the hard-to-source CH340 USB-serial circuit and replacing it with another USB option (or with an FTDI interface), and changing little/nothing else, would I think be a good next iteration that would still preserve most of the original documentation ...

Cheers!

Don

[Liz Barry]

Great, thanks Don!

Here's the update of what's going on: Abdul and I have been lining up the order with Macrofab and that is going well. 

We are working to get back in touch with the person who indicated they'd order 50 if a certain price point was reached. We're still trying to get in touch. 

Once that order is confirmed, we will know the price per Riffle, and start taking pre-paid orders from folks, and actually place the order. 

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