Re: parts cost

>Considering that the bare board is probably going to be $200, spending
>$100 on parts doesn't seem out of line.

Well, I want to keep the price reasonable and more importantly keep the
scope of the project small enough that it can be realistically completed in
the spare time of those of use working on it. :-) So in general I'm
trying to avoid lots of chips, chips with fine pitch surface mount
packages, and wide address busses that we're need x16 or x24 bit data paths
on. Unless someone has a copy of PADs PCB or Tango and knows how to use
it, I'm thinking this will be hand routed and I'm not keen on playing with
10000 nets in two layers... ;-)

We could always just use one of those $99 TI 32c0xx "audio" eval boards... ;-)

>If anyone knows of a cheaper PC house, i'd be interested in hearing about
>it. Like I said in a previous mail message, I used to get good prices on
>double-sided boards from Rob Lashinski at Capitol Circuits in Carol Stream
>IL, but I don't know if Rob is still around (this was over 10 years ago).

Well, I got a quote of $12/each for an 8.5"x11" PCB. Of course that was
from hong-kong, and a minimum order of 500 units... :-/ I really want to
keep the board size to 8.5x6" which would get us under $50/pcb (bare)
without much trouble. My proto's will be more in the $60-70/ea range (qty
4), albeit without soldermask or silkscreen...

>I'm still leaning towards a cheap 16 bit Analog Devices DSP. There must be
>some sound code around for these things somewhere...

I think that's a groovy idea. Do you have time to learn to program the
thing though? (That's why I keep kicking the PIC/other ideas around with
Zonn.) This does have DSP written all over it though, I must admit-- and
the AD beats the hell out of the TI stuff for programming, IMHO...

-Clay

Clayton N. Cowgill Engineering Manager
_______________________________________________________________________
/\ Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. clay@supra.com
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Received on Fri May 2 11:40:57 1997