7 ms·

Fixing a Tiny Corner of the Supply Chain

233 points by picture 5y ago

quickthrower2 5y ago
Excellent story. Love the bit a out adding a raspberry pi to the order so it wouldn’t get lost. Clearly for someone who could afford or need 18000 units there would be no supply chain issue. So it sounds like there are potentially more issues if you are a very small operation.
hef19898 5y ago
That is a great read! I like the rather simple root-cause, the bad master data Mel identified and sorted out. Stuff like that is usually covered up by excess inventory, now with all the supply chain issues, those issues disrupt things. And it shows the one point I always try to drive across: Logistics and Supply Chain is a people business. No amount of ML, algorithms and cooperation / collaboration tools can change that. If things get hairy, pick up the phone and talk to people. Even better, use 21st century tech to automate routine stuff and use the free time to talk and build relationships with people at your supplier or customers.
- 9dev 5y ago
  As someone working in the space, I'd like to respectfully disagree: All players on the market right now, us included, don't focus on replacing, but facilitating human communication by using algorithms. The supply chain is in bad need of a digital overhaul, because things are fundamentally intransparent. Even big companies have no idea where their suppliers came from, what expensive lunch invitation actually got a deal started. With a sudden, global market disruption, they start to notice entire factories stand still if a single, tier-3 supplier is unable to deliver in time. The solution is insights into supply chains, and visibility for suppliers, so people can make business more easily.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Sure, that idea of transparency is around since someone came up with the SCOR model. The reason why I, personally, don't like the whole algorithm and ML things in Supply Chain is that I saw it more often than not coming from people with limited operational experience jumping on the latest bandwagon / hype train. And I have yet to see supply chain modelling that resulted in overall lower lead times and inventory levels. I am all in for using those tools so, but with discretion. E.g. if optimization software comes up with lower safety stock levels than what you have, use those. If the calculated levels are higher than actual ones, stick with the actual ones. I highly doubt so, that companies that failed to control their supply chains properly pre-COVID disruption would be able to benefit from increased insight into sub-tier suppliers. Those that do benefit from that insight are those that were already better than most before and will be even better after those insights are gained. One of the reasons nobody seems to be able to catch up to the likes of Apple, Amazon or Proctor&Gamble.
    - lifeisstillgood 5y ago
      I have always assumed that the big use of blockchain is for supply chain management. If "everyone" had access to the same chain, would that not bring "everyone" up to the level of at least knowing where the stock actually was? Edit: ok let me show how little I understand or have thought about this. Its possible for every primary producer to create a new "chain" for each of its products. For factories this is in the bounds of possible. At this point everyone who touches it could use a public / private key hand off to confirm receipt and then append to the chain. I suspect this will hit massive problems that I don't know about, but the principle makes sense. I do not know if the incentive align - but globally the idea of being able to track every single manufactured good across the world seems like it should be profitable.
      - hef19898 5y ago
        The biggest issue with blockchain is the need to match the virtual blockchain to the physical goods. Once that link is lost, which happens every day, the blockchain is basically useless. Also, you uave to trust whomever that what the blockchain says is correct. Sure, you can audit these things on site, but then I don't see the benefit of a blockchain. Also, supply chains are made up of often times competing players. The amount of insight one could gain on other companies from a comolete blockchain is, IMHO, a big hinderance as well.
yetihehe 5y ago
We got it so easy with software that my occasional build problems look like child's play. Actually manufacturing millions of those different chips is hidden from sight, but oh so complicated, it's essentially pinnacle of human civilisation.
choeger 5y ago
After reading this story I wonder if we are already into deep, deep trouble. So many things depend on timely production and delivery of complex goods and very often that production depends on a stack of badly written and badly used software operated by underpaid and demotivated staff. How long until we literally cannot improvise a solution anymore? When has the last "process optimization" by some MBA consultant put up so many layers between motivated human beings that a problem is unfixable? Could civilization actually end like this? Not in a big bang but slowly grinding to a halt because no one knows how stuff works besides some nonfunctional web forms?
- vasco 5y ago
  Everything looks crazy when you look at the details but the fact that we could all stay home for months and the world largely kept chugging along with only minor pricing changes and delays should give you an indication of how resilient supply chains are. No food was missing, no essential goods, largely the world stopped and yet all the important goods kept flowing. It's incredible to me how food shortages didn't hit multiple countries for example, which would be an indication of problems.
  - estaseuropano 5y ago
    Sorry but you are sorely mistaken. The disruption for well-off people in rich countries was fairly minimal, but in other parts of the world and even in the poor areas of rich countries people felt the effects. Food insecurity in some countries is higher than ever, not to mention effects like years.of education missed (e.g. Philippines had 18 months of home schooling).
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      People are suffering, but we were not close to the end of civilization.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    i dont know what you mean by “we could all stay home”, most people never stopped working, amazon deliveries kept coming, butchers and meatpackers never slowed down, and transpacific cargo ships kept moving (long beach port snafu notwithstanding) also, I did have to go without my preferred brands of couscous and fresh olives for some months, so as far as i’m concerned the end was nigh
jwr 5y ago
This exposes a bit of something that everyone in the electronics industry knows, but nobody speaks about openly — that the electronic component distributors are IT dinosaurs. Their computer systems are dated and their software not up to today's standards. Most of them haven't realized that it is their software that is their core value right now, not the parts they have sitting on shelves. I think this market is up for disruption once somebody brave enough appears and enters the market, starting from the software side.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Like a state-of-the-art ERP system?
  - jabl 5y ago
    Given that a "successful" ERP rollout seems to entail paying an army of ABAP consultants for years, and a major revamp of company processes, maybe the ERP market is also ripe for disruption? ;-)
    - hef19898 5y ago
      Good luck with that. Because any ERP roll-out will involve the rework of business processes, whether you use SAP with expensive ABAP consultants or something else. Reworking the business processes to match the ERP is, by the way, the way it should be. Trying to do it the other way round is usually a good route into disaster.
- leoedin 5y ago
  Bad handling of out of stock components aside, I'm routinely amazed at how effective DigiKey and Mouser are. I can order a cart of 40 different items, each costing $0.05, getting 1 or 2 of each, and somehow they manage to routinely deliver in 2 days exactly what I ordered. They must lose quite a lot of money on those R&D orders - there's just no way you can make money having someone hunt down a specific resistor, cut 3 of them off a reel and put them in a bag.
laydn 5y ago
The entire electronics supply chain is currently a shit show and this post explained it perfectly. Other anecdotes from our experiences: - Chipmaker/Distributor quotes 36 weeks for the parts, we arrange all shipments of all components to the factory based on that date since that part had the longest lead time (~80 unique part numbers in product). 4 weeks later, parts arrive at factory!. We have to wait for all other components for another 32 weeks. Manufacturer does not understand why we're mad since they shipped early! - Distributor accepts order for a 10ppm MEMS oscillator. After 6 months of silence, we contact the manufacturer directly and they confirm that 10ppm parts will not be manufactured for at least another year since they are prioritizing 50ppm parts. - Microcontroller manufacturer quotes ~2 years(!) for a part. The brokers have it in stock, and quote approximately 20 times the usual pricing (with a date code of 2021 to rub it in!) - FPGA manufacturer accepts order for 500pcs, with a lead time of 48 weeks (ok!). After 30 weeks, manufacturer increases pricing for 20% for all orders, including open, active orders. They offer us to cancel the order if we want! - Analog IC manufacturer announces that they will increase pricing of all products, including all open and active orders, but they can not tell how much of an increase it will be until..... until they are ready to announce I suppose. - Chip manufacturer sells a chip through its own web page only. Part is currently not defined in any distributors so you have to use their web site. Chip is currently not in stock. However, their order system does not accept back-orders(?!). You have to check back "often" to catch the exact moment when this chip becomes available. ... the list goes on and on ...
- hef19898 5y ago
  > - Chipmaker/Distributor quotes 36 weeks for the parts, we arrange all shipments of all components to the factory based on that date since that part had the longest lead time (~80 unique part numbers in product). 4 weeks later, parts arrive at factory!. We have to wait for all other components for another 32 weeks. Manufacturer does not understand why we're mad since they shipped early! Ah, so true! It shows nicely why predictable but longer lead times are better than potentially shorter ones that are totally chaotic. Being to properly plan is such a huge factor.
- ryanmercer 5y ago
  I've cleared international freight through Customs for a living for 15.5 years now, it's been interesting watching the reduction in electrical components coming in. It used to be that half or more of the shipments I would process a day would be integrated circuits/memory modules/resistors/capacitors. Now I'll see memory modules once a week, integrated circuits might be 5% of what I see a day, capacitors and resistors I'll see a few times a week now. The value of the shipments is way way down too, instead of seeing a few hundred thousand dollars of ICs in a shipment, tens of thousands of ICs, I'll see tens of thousands of dollars of ICS in a shipment with the count in the thousands because, presumably, that's all that can be had. I also notice HDD, SSD, and flash cards/USB storage imports seem to be way, way, down - presumably because they contain ICs as well.
londons_explore 5y ago
> I confirmed that in fact the parts are shipped to Digikey as blanks, and they have a machine that can program the parts on-site. I have never seen this before... I would expect the parts to either be factory programmed (and marked), or programmed by the customer (For example, the oscillator starts at 1 Mhz, and then you do some odd handshake to change the rate.). Are there any other parts programmed at distributors? If this is a rare thing, I can completely see how the stock control mechanism can't cope with one part number incoming to the warehouse, but many different ones exiting...
- zokier 5y ago
  They list at least fpgas, cplds, and mcus available to be programmed in addition to oscillators: https://forum.digikey.com/t/custom-programming/693 https://forum.digikey.com/t/custom-programming/693
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
db48x 5y ago
Sounds like it is time for the Second Story of Mel.
- MerelyMortal 5y ago
  The Story of Mel: http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
dane-pgp 5y ago
> I’m considering ordering 18,000 oscillators and reselling the excess as singles via Crowd Supply I've often wondered why no one offers something like this as a service. People who want to order a small quantity of some item with a large minimum order size could register their interest somewhere, and others who are interested could add themselves to their order, until the necessary threshold was reached. Presumably the problem is one of scale, as the service would need millions of registered users in order to have a chance that enough of them all wanted the same thing at the same time. For that reason, though, I'm surprised that Amazon hasn't offered this yet. If there's a product that sells as a box of 100 identical items, and you only want 1 or 2, you should be able to click a button that says "Let me join a group to order this product", and Amazon could charge a fee to split open the box for you and re-ship the individual items to the various members of the group.
- ghusbands 5y ago
  Consumer rights laws in various locations might make this tricky; you have to handle repair/refund, fitness for purpose, etc. When things are sold for retail, the manufacturer will have a support route for this. You'll also potentially fall afoul of how regulations differ between business sales and consumer sales.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    Sounds like FUD. There are plenty of electronics distributors, small and large, that you can order individual ICs from as a consumer. How are they all pulling it off if it's so tricky? Some parts have MOQs, I guess distributors don't see the business value in buying reels to sell a chip or three if it's reasonable to expect that the rest of the reel will sit on shelf for months (or worse).
- teddyh 5y ago
  Wasn’t this what Massdrop was for? (Now apparently at drop.com)
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
davejohnclark 5y ago
> I did a quick trawl through the patents filed by SiTimes, and I’m guessing the MEMS oscillator chip contains at least two separate oscillators. These oscillators are intentionally different, so that their frequency drift with temperature also have different, but predictable, curves. They can use the relative difference of the frequencies to very precisely measure the absolute temperature of the pair of oscillators by comparing the instantaneous difference between the two frequencies. In other words, they took the exact problem that plagues silicon designs, and turned it into a feature: they built a very precise temperature sensor out of two silicon oscillators. I finally got around to reading the excellent Logitude by Dava Sobel (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4806.Longitude https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4806.Longitude) and to a lay-person this sounds like a similar principle that Harrison applied to design the bimetallic strip used to preserve the accuracy of his clocks in the face of temperature changes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimetallic_strip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimetallic_strip). Very cool.
- civilized 5y ago
  Thank you kind sir. I just woke up and the bimetallic strip has already made my day.
lbayes 5y ago
I've had a couple of opportunities to interact with Digikey support and can confirm. They are incredibly, almost unbelievably helpful. They've more than earned my business as my primary distributor.
hprotagonist 5y ago
Digikey has been reliably amazing for a very long time. Calling them up in CONUS and getting a real human, normally with a strong “Bobby’s World” yooper accent, who speaks flawless and rapid NATO Phonetic Alphabet and rattles off your part numbers back to you to double check them … perfect.
simonbarker87 5y ago
Two things jump out at me: 1. Having to order parts yourself and send them to a factory is something I’ve done a few times and still baffles me. It was easier for me to buy some parts from the US, ship to me in the UK and then send to China than for the Chinese factory to do it. All totally legit and about a 95% time saving. 2. > I finally do the “unthinkable” in the web age – I pick up the phone, and dial in hoping to reach a real human being to plead my case. I dial the extension for the custom department sales rep. It drops straight to voice mail. I call back again, this time punching the number to draw a lottery ticket for a new sales rep. He should have done this at the start. When it comes to supply chain problems it’s usually always a people problem. The first thing you do as soon as you get an undesirable result from email is pick up the phone and have a conversation. It works pretty much every time.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  This exactly. The difference between the faceless monoliths of the FAANG customer support world and those of the electronics distribution world is that in the latter case there is a sales rep behind the monolith who stands to get a substantial commission for making sure you can successfully get parts. If there's anything I've gained from this hellish year+ of building hardware, it's a much more frank and open relationship with our various CMs and distribution reps. These problems are none of their faults, and in many cases they've gone to ridiculous lengths to keep us (a relatively small fish) afloat.
  - simonbarker87 5y ago
    100% my default was to just pick up the phone and call a supplier - then when you’re in a bind you have a personal relationship that goes a long way to smoothing out issues (in both directions)
mherdeg 5y ago
I thought I understood this until: > the parts are shipped to Digikey as blanks, and they have a machine that can program the parts on-site What is going on here? Is the thing that there is a picture of earlier in the blog post (the two chips bonded together with some other parts surrounding it) a piece that can do many different jobs and be sold as many different SKUs??
- lief79 5y ago
  I believe they're referencing a fixed clock speed, so I'd assume that they have a SKU for standard clock speeds, which can be set as needed.
- rasz 5y ago
  Its a programmable pll clock synthesizer(100ppm) pretending to be a crystal oscillator.
ameminator 5y ago
I like Bunnie a lot and I always enjoy reading posts from his website. That said, while I generally support his hardware manufacturing ideas, it's exceptionally hard to compete in this space against the largest electronics companies and against Asian manufacturing. As someone who also used to be involved in North American electronics manufacturing, there are so many factors, from local environmental regulations to the large network effects in Shenzhen, that it's almost impossible unless you have something truly novel and brilliant marketing. Good luck to Bunnie, I hope it works out. Finally, let me just comment on the magnificent customer service of Digikey. If I ever had to source anything electronic, I would use them again in a heartbeat, to the point where I would use them over cheaper alternatives, because they are so good.

233 points by picture 5y ago

Excellent story. Love the bit a out adding a raspberry pi to the order so it wouldn’t get lost. Clearly for someone who could afford or need 18000 units there would be no supply chain issue. So it sounds like there are potentially more issues if you are a very small operation.

hef19898 5y ago

That is a great read! I like the rather simple root-cause, the bad master data Mel identified and sorted out. Stuff like that is usually covered up by excess inventory, now with all the supply chain issues, those issues disrupt things. And it shows the one point I always try to drive across: Logistics and Supply Chain is a people business. No amount of ML, algorithms and cooperation / collaboration tools can change that. If things get hairy, pick up the phone and talk to people. Even better, use 21st century tech to automate routine stuff and use the free time to talk and build relationships with people at your supplier or customers.

9dev 5y ago
As someone working in the space, I'd like to respectfully disagree: All players on the market right now, us included, don't focus on replacing, but facilitating human communication by using algorithms. The supply chain is in bad need of a digital overhaul, because things are fundamentally intransparent. Even big companies have no idea where their suppliers came from, what expensive lunch invitation actually got a deal started. With a sudden, global market disruption, they start to notice entire factories stand still if a single, tier-3 supplier is unable to deliver in time. The solution is insights into supply chains, and visibility for suppliers, so people can make business more easily.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Sure, that idea of transparency is around since someone came up with the SCOR model. The reason why I, personally, don't like the whole algorithm and ML things in Supply Chain is that I saw it more often than not coming from people with limited operational experience jumping on the latest bandwagon / hype train. And I have yet to see supply chain modelling that resulted in overall lower lead times and inventory levels. I am all in for using those tools so, but with discretion. E.g. if optimization software comes up with lower safety stock levels than what you have, use those. If the calculated levels are higher than actual ones, stick with the actual ones. I highly doubt so, that companies that failed to control their supply chains properly pre-COVID disruption would be able to benefit from increased insight into sub-tier suppliers. Those that do benefit from that insight are those that were already better than most before and will be even better after those insights are gained. One of the reasons nobody seems to be able to catch up to the likes of Apple, Amazon or Proctor&Gamble.
  - lifeisstillgood 5y ago
    I have always assumed that the big use of blockchain is for supply chain management. If "everyone" had access to the same chain, would that not bring "everyone" up to the level of at least knowing where the stock actually was? Edit: ok let me show how little I understand or have thought about this. Its possible for every primary producer to create a new "chain" for each of its products. For factories this is in the bounds of possible. At this point everyone who touches it could use a public / private key hand off to confirm receipt and then append to the chain. I suspect this will hit massive problems that I don't know about, but the principle makes sense. I do not know if the incentive align - but globally the idea of being able to track every single manufactured good across the world seems like it should be profitable.
    - hef19898 5y ago
      The biggest issue with blockchain is the need to match the virtual blockchain to the physical goods. Once that link is lost, which happens every day, the blockchain is basically useless. Also, you uave to trust whomever that what the blockchain says is correct. Sure, you can audit these things on site, but then I don't see the benefit of a blockchain. Also, supply chains are made up of often times competing players. The amount of insight one could gain on other companies from a comolete blockchain is, IMHO, a big hinderance as well.

yetihehe 5y ago

We got it so easy with software that my occasional build problems look like child's play. Actually manufacturing millions of those different chips is hidden from sight, but oh so complicated, it's essentially pinnacle of human civilisation.

choeger 5y ago

After reading this story I wonder if we are already into deep, deep trouble. So many things depend on timely production and delivery of complex goods and very often that production depends on a stack of badly written and badly used software operated by underpaid and demotivated staff. How long until we literally cannot improvise a solution anymore? When has the last "process optimization" by some MBA consultant put up so many layers between motivated human beings that a problem is unfixable? Could civilization actually end like this? Not in a big bang but slowly grinding to a halt because no one knows how stuff works besides some nonfunctional web forms?

vasco 5y ago
Everything looks crazy when you look at the details but the fact that we could all stay home for months and the world largely kept chugging along with only minor pricing changes and delays should give you an indication of how resilient supply chains are. No food was missing, no essential goods, largely the world stopped and yet all the important goods kept flowing. It's incredible to me how food shortages didn't hit multiple countries for example, which would be an indication of problems.
- estaseuropano 5y ago
  Sorry but you are sorely mistaken. The disruption for well-off people in rich countries was fairly minimal, but in other parts of the world and even in the poor areas of rich countries people felt the effects. Food insecurity in some countries is higher than ever, not to mention effects like years.of education missed (e.g. Philippines had 18 months of home schooling).
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    People are suffering, but we were not close to the end of civilization.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  i dont know what you mean by “we could all stay home”, most people never stopped working, amazon deliveries kept coming, butchers and meatpackers never slowed down, and transpacific cargo ships kept moving (long beach port snafu notwithstanding) also, I did have to go without my preferred brands of couscous and fresh olives for some months, so as far as i’m concerned the end was nigh

jwr 5y ago

This exposes a bit of something that everyone in the electronics industry knows, but nobody speaks about openly — that the electronic component distributors are IT dinosaurs. Their computer systems are dated and their software not up to today's standards. Most of them haven't realized that it is their software that is their core value right now, not the parts they have sitting on shelves. I think this market is up for disruption once somebody brave enough appears and enters the market, starting from the software side.

hef19898 5y ago
Like a state-of-the-art ERP system?
- jabl 5y ago
  Given that a "successful" ERP rollout seems to entail paying an army of ABAP consultants for years, and a major revamp of company processes, maybe the ERP market is also ripe for disruption? ;-)
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Good luck with that. Because any ERP roll-out will involve the rework of business processes, whether you use SAP with expensive ABAP consultants or something else. Reworking the business processes to match the ERP is, by the way, the way it should be. Trying to do it the other way round is usually a good route into disaster.
leoedin 5y ago
Bad handling of out of stock components aside, I'm routinely amazed at how effective DigiKey and Mouser are. I can order a cart of 40 different items, each costing $0.05, getting 1 or 2 of each, and somehow they manage to routinely deliver in 2 days exactly what I ordered. They must lose quite a lot of money on those R&D orders - there's just no way you can make money having someone hunt down a specific resistor, cut 3 of them off a reel and put them in a bag.

laydn 5y ago

The entire electronics supply chain is currently a shit show and this post explained it perfectly. Other anecdotes from our experiences: - Chipmaker/Distributor quotes 36 weeks for the parts, we arrange all shipments of all components to the factory based on that date since that part had the longest lead time (~80 unique part numbers in product). 4 weeks later, parts arrive at factory!. We have to wait for all other components for another 32 weeks. Manufacturer does not understand why we're mad since they shipped early! - Distributor accepts order for a 10ppm MEMS oscillator. After 6 months of silence, we contact the manufacturer directly and they confirm that 10ppm parts will not be manufactured for at least another year since they are prioritizing 50ppm parts. - Microcontroller manufacturer quotes ~2 years(!) for a part. The brokers have it in stock, and quote approximately 20 times the usual pricing (with a date code of 2021 to rub it in!) - FPGA manufacturer accepts order for 500pcs, with a lead time of 48 weeks (ok!). After 30 weeks, manufacturer increases pricing for 20% for all orders, including open, active orders. They offer us to cancel the order if we want! - Analog IC manufacturer announces that they will increase pricing of all products, including all open and active orders, but they can not tell how much of an increase it will be until..... until they are ready to announce I suppose. - Chip manufacturer sells a chip through its own web page only. Part is currently not defined in any distributors so you have to use their web site. Chip is currently not in stock. However, their order system does not accept back-orders(?!). You have to check back "often" to catch the exact moment when this chip becomes available. ... the list goes on and on ...

hef19898 5y ago
> - Chipmaker/Distributor quotes 36 weeks for the parts, we arrange all shipments of all components to the factory based on that date since that part had the longest lead time (~80 unique part numbers in product). 4 weeks later, parts arrive at factory!. We have to wait for all other components for another 32 weeks. Manufacturer does not understand why we're mad since they shipped early! Ah, so true! It shows nicely why predictable but longer lead times are better than potentially shorter ones that are totally chaotic. Being to properly plan is such a huge factor.
ryanmercer 5y ago
I've cleared international freight through Customs for a living for 15.5 years now, it's been interesting watching the reduction in electrical components coming in. It used to be that half or more of the shipments I would process a day would be integrated circuits/memory modules/resistors/capacitors. Now I'll see memory modules once a week, integrated circuits might be 5% of what I see a day, capacitors and resistors I'll see a few times a week now. The value of the shipments is way way down too, instead of seeing a few hundred thousand dollars of ICs in a shipment, tens of thousands of ICs, I'll see tens of thousands of dollars of ICS in a shipment with the count in the thousands because, presumably, that's all that can be had. I also notice HDD, SSD, and flash cards/USB storage imports seem to be way, way, down - presumably because they contain ICs as well.

londons_explore 5y ago

> I confirmed that in fact the parts are shipped to Digikey as blanks, and they have a machine that can program the parts on-site. I have never seen this before... I would expect the parts to either be factory programmed (and marked), or programmed by the customer (For example, the oscillator starts at 1 Mhz, and then you do some odd handshake to change the rate.). Are there any other parts programmed at distributors? If this is a rare thing, I can completely see how the stock control mechanism can't cope with one part number incoming to the warehouse, but many different ones exiting...

zokier 5y ago
They list at least fpgas, cplds, and mcus available to be programmed in addition to oscillators: https://forum.digikey.com/t/custom-programming/693 https://forum.digikey.com/t/custom-programming/693

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

db48x 5y ago

Sounds like it is time for the Second Story of Mel.

MerelyMortal 5y ago
The Story of Mel: http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

dane-pgp 5y ago

> I’m considering ordering 18,000 oscillators and reselling the excess as singles via Crowd Supply I've often wondered why no one offers something like this as a service. People who want to order a small quantity of some item with a large minimum order size could register their interest somewhere, and others who are interested could add themselves to their order, until the necessary threshold was reached. Presumably the problem is one of scale, as the service would need millions of registered users in order to have a chance that enough of them all wanted the same thing at the same time. For that reason, though, I'm surprised that Amazon hasn't offered this yet. If there's a product that sells as a box of 100 identical items, and you only want 1 or 2, you should be able to click a button that says "Let me join a group to order this product", and Amazon could charge a fee to split open the box for you and re-ship the individual items to the various members of the group.

ghusbands 5y ago
Consumer rights laws in various locations might make this tricky; you have to handle repair/refund, fitness for purpose, etc. When things are sold for retail, the manufacturer will have a support route for this. You'll also potentially fall afoul of how regulations differ between business sales and consumer sales.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  Sounds like FUD. There are plenty of electronics distributors, small and large, that you can order individual ICs from as a consumer. How are they all pulling it off if it's so tricky? Some parts have MOQs, I guess distributors don't see the business value in buying reels to sell a chip or three if it's reasonable to expect that the rest of the reel will sit on shelf for months (or worse).
teddyh 5y ago
Wasn’t this what Massdrop was for? (Now apparently at drop.com)
- dane-pgp 5y ago

davejohnclark 5y ago

> I did a quick trawl through the patents filed by SiTimes, and I’m guessing the MEMS oscillator chip contains at least two separate oscillators. These oscillators are intentionally different, so that their frequency drift with temperature also have different, but predictable, curves. They can use the relative difference of the frequencies to very precisely measure the absolute temperature of the pair of oscillators by comparing the instantaneous difference between the two frequencies. In other words, they took the exact problem that plagues silicon designs, and turned it into a feature: they built a very precise temperature sensor out of two silicon oscillators. I finally got around to reading the excellent Logitude by Dava Sobel (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4806.Longitude https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4806.Longitude) and to a lay-person this sounds like a similar principle that Harrison applied to design the bimetallic strip used to preserve the accuracy of his clocks in the face of temperature changes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimetallic_strip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimetallic_strip). Very cool.

civilized 5y ago
Thank you kind sir. I just woke up and the bimetallic strip has already made my day.

lbayes 5y ago

I've had a couple of opportunities to interact with Digikey support and can confirm. They are incredibly, almost unbelievably helpful. They've more than earned my business as my primary distributor.

hprotagonist 5y ago

Digikey has been reliably amazing for a very long time. Calling them up in CONUS and getting a real human, normally with a strong “Bobby’s World” yooper accent, who speaks flawless and rapid NATO Phonetic Alphabet and rattles off your part numbers back to you to double check them … perfect.

simonbarker87 5y ago

Two things jump out at me: 1. Having to order parts yourself and send them to a factory is something I’ve done a few times and still baffles me. It was easier for me to buy some parts from the US, ship to me in the UK and then send to China than for the Chinese factory to do it. All totally legit and about a 95% time saving. 2. > I finally do the “unthinkable” in the web age – I pick up the phone, and dial in hoping to reach a real human being to plead my case. I dial the extension for the custom department sales rep. It drops straight to voice mail. I call back again, this time punching the number to draw a lottery ticket for a new sales rep. He should have done this at the start. When it comes to supply chain problems it’s usually always a people problem. The first thing you do as soon as you get an undesirable result from email is pick up the phone and have a conversation. It works pretty much every time.

InitialLastName 5y ago
This exactly. The difference between the faceless monoliths of the FAANG customer support world and those of the electronics distribution world is that in the latter case there is a sales rep behind the monolith who stands to get a substantial commission for making sure you can successfully get parts. If there's anything I've gained from this hellish year+ of building hardware, it's a much more frank and open relationship with our various CMs and distribution reps. These problems are none of their faults, and in many cases they've gone to ridiculous lengths to keep us (a relatively small fish) afloat.
- simonbarker87 5y ago
  100% my default was to just pick up the phone and call a supplier - then when you’re in a bind you have a personal relationship that goes a long way to smoothing out issues (in both directions)

mherdeg 5y ago

I thought I understood this until: > the parts are shipped to Digikey as blanks, and they have a machine that can program the parts on-site What is going on here? Is the thing that there is a picture of earlier in the blog post (the two chips bonded together with some other parts surrounding it) a piece that can do many different jobs and be sold as many different SKUs??

lief79 5y ago
I believe they're referencing a fixed clock speed, so I'd assume that they have a SKU for standard clock speeds, which can be set as needed.
rasz 5y ago
Its a programmable pll clock synthesizer(100ppm) pretending to be a crystal oscillator.

ameminator 5y ago

I like Bunnie a lot and I always enjoy reading posts from his website. That said, while I generally support his hardware manufacturing ideas, it's exceptionally hard to compete in this space against the largest electronics companies and against Asian manufacturing. As someone who also used to be involved in North American electronics manufacturing, there are so many factors, from local environmental regulations to the large network effects in Shenzhen, that it's almost impossible unless you have something truly novel and brilliant marketing. Good luck to Bunnie, I hope it works out. Finally, let me just comment on the magnificent customer service of Digikey. If I ever had to source anything electronic, I would use them again in a heartbeat, to the point where I would use them over cheaper alternatives, because they are so good.