Mini Boards |
The Mini Board is a business card-sized robot controller, great for connecting motors and sensors to desktop machines.
Douglas Electronics has been a manufacturer of prototyping "breadboards" for over 40 years, and we also manufacture hundreds of custom printed circuit designs every month for people using our Macintosh-based CAD/CAM software. One such user of our software is Fred Martin, of MIT, the designer of the Mini Board. Fred also chose us to manufacture prototypes of the board for him. When he revised the design (very slightly) we asked for and received his enthusiastic permission to add his design to our breadboard product line, which means that we now keep this board in stock, and can sell to experimenters right off the shelf, usually shipping the order the same day.
We sell bare Mini Board PCBs. More information on parts for the boards and schematics is in Fred's paper at MIT Mini Board Info and update information for version 2.1 is at Mini Board 2.1 changes.
Pricing for the Mini Board is as follows:
| Board | Quantity | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 - 9 | 10 - 49 | 50 + | |
| Mini Board | $ 10.00 | $ 7.50 ea. | $ 6.25 ea. | $ 5.00 ea. |
| Note: There is also a dollar volume discount on all breadboard products, that applies to orders over $500. | ||||
Shipping is specified by and paid by the customer, and California residents are subject to state sales tax.
As you can see, at these prices this is not a huge money maker for us, but there is a small profit in it, and we are glad to do it, because it exposes a relatively untapped segment of the market to Douglas Electronics (so far several of the Mini Board orders have resulted in inquiries about our design software, some of which have matured into software sales), and several Mini Board customers have returned to order other Breadboards from us (our reputation for quality is excellent). It's truly a situation where everybody wins. We make a small margin and get valuable market exposure, while robotics experimenters get to order small quantities of Fred's very elegant (and well supported) design without having to incur the normal set-up charges, delays, and minimums of a custom manufacturing run.
These are bare boards only (not assembled units or kits) but all of the parts you need to populate the Mini Board should be available from common parts suppliers such as Digi-Key, Newark, etc. and a silkscreened legend on the board helps you put everything where it belongs. There is also a great wealth of information about the Mini Board on an MIT FTP server available for anonymous FTP. We sell high quality bare boards at very attractive price points.