Experiment

Do a zillion press releases, because they make links. The Brat has a list and contacts.

How much does Amazon charge?

That's intriguing. How does Amazon's fulfillment process work for internat ional orders? When I was selling low-volume T&M hardware, I found that rou ghly 50% of my business was outside the US. The international shipping doc umentation and export paperwork was pretty time-consuming, and also a bit i ntimidating. (God help you if you sell so much as a strawberry Slurpee to someone on any of Uncle Sam's shit lists.)

Removing the various international shipping hassles would add a lot of valu e, especially if they also get discounts from carriers. One of the mistake s I made was offering free shipping by FedEx; that turns out to be almost s uicidally expensive for an individual shipper.

-- john, KE5FX

Last time I checked, Amazon charged 7% markup plus a few bucks a month per cubic foot. For handling all that tedious time consuming back-office stuff, that's a gift.

Dunno about international orders.

Once we have boards, we'll do a couple by hand and see how they work. BLH is learning about pick & place, panelizing boards, and so on, so we'll be all set, I expect.

The metal-bashing, labelling, and packaging are next on the list. We'll take a leaf out of JL's book and use printed labels on the case, but getting the boxes machined locally will take a bit of homework, and we'll have to figure out Amazon's requirements on packaging, SKU numbers, and so on.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Try Melrose Nameplate for polycarb stickers. Chris Somers.

Target price? What box is it going in? We have Al "bathtubs" milled out of bar stock.

George H.

Probably $750ish. The super-crappy Thor Labs ones are $350 or so, and this one is pretty decent.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

For that price difference you may want to find some movers & shakers and _give_ them samples.

Maybe there's a lab out there that publishes a lot and talks to other researchers?

Photoreceivers are a perennial problem that everybody in the biz knows about, and prices vary all over the map. (I also have a bit of name recognition in the field.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

In my experience finding a good machine shop takes a little leg work too. Make a drawing, gets some quotes...and at the same time try to talk to them about your "thing". I don't mind paying a bit more for the shop that I can talk with.

Oh final sort of random thing, and that is finishes. If you are getting the part anodized, then IME, contract with the machine shop to have that part of the price. They'll have some anodizing palce they work with.

For other coatings, powder coating.. finding your own shop works fine, though again the machine shop may have someone they work with and that can save you work.

George H.

Everyone wants to see a photo now :-)

I found that most larger companies do not consider buying at Amazon. They or their SOPs require sources that work via purchase orders, not credit cards. With smaller companies that's easier but even there I first saw wide eyes when I suggested to buy an Asian oscilloscope or arb gen at Amazon ... "Where? Really?" ... Until they saw the price and it was 1/10th of what they had expected from the mainstream manufacturers.

Another option would be distributors like this:

Initially it'll probably be a small Hammond extruded box with a few holes a nd maybe a Pem nut for the mount.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

One issue with some of the Hammond boxes is that they use self-tapping screws into an extruded slot, not a closed hole. So you get metal bits inside the box. We haven't had any shorts so far, but we are injecting a bit of silicone into the slots to catch the shavings.

Ask your shop if they can tap the slots, and then use a machine screw. The process does tend to break taps.

As you know, the market for fancy photoreceivers is somewhat uncertain. ;) So we'll probably get the shop to make a stack of 20 sets of end plates to start with, and worry about scaling when those are sold out. A nice printed sticker covers a multitude of mechanical sins.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

We use tri-lobed thread forming screws for extrusions. They don't cut metal bits loose.

One danger with selling optical-bench things like that is that you may sell a few onesies to researchers who need a lot of support. A better market is OEM, where you can get a customer that buys 50 a year or something. That might be an unpackaged board. The packaged version becomes the demo.

I get those calls anyway. ;)

Would be nice. Maybe Newport or Thor Labs would like to sell them--we'll se e. I tried to get Newport to invest in a follow-on to their noise canceller product, but they were too chicken. If the first product or two generate a ny revenue, I'll be more motivated to finish up that swoopy auto-tweaked no ise canceller.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Her social media photo was one I took when she was 9 months old. Suffice it to say that she's dramatically better looking than I am. ;)

: building an

IME that's much less of an issue for stuff under about $1k. However, I'll h appily accept POs for quantity 10 and above. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

s one is pretty decent. Grin, last I check the specs on the PD we sell is about like T-labs.

$750 seems high to me. (But I don't buy a lot of photodiodes.)

George H.

Those are fine for undemanding jobs. Lots of the folks I talk to need good measurements in very low light (picoamps to nanoamps) and some reasonable b andwidth like 100 kHz to 1 MHz.

This box has a switch-selectable bandwidth, set by a 2-pole Bessel wrapped round the output amp, and as I say, it's shot-noise limited above about 7 n A in a 1-MHz bandwidth (full scale is 1 uA). I could easily make a variant that's quieter but slower (1 nA at the shot noise in 200 kHz, say), or with a bigger PD, or a lens to get more detection area. I might make those spec ial-order options at first, like the fibre-coupled one.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs