Prototype circuit seized by USPS

I contacted the postal service, and rather as I was expecting, they keep no records of particular shipments that are damaged. The representative said that the fact that a shipment is damaged is just noted by one of the USPS distribution centers local to the client, and the letter sent along with it.

He suggested I contact the USPS "lost and found" in Atlanta to see if they might have swept it up, which I have done via email, but I'm also not expecting anything.

Other than file an insurance claim, which seems like it has a good chance of being denied, it looks like this situation will forever remain a mystery.

Never send anything you want to lose by USPS. I use only FedEx with never a problem. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142   Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 

             I'm looking for work... see my website.

We have had a lot of problems with Fed Ex. We have seen the driver stop at the road and then drive on instead of coming down the driveway. The USPS guy makes the effort. Might be the bottle of whiskey we give him at Christmas.

But did get a Fed Ex package recently. So maybe it is a new driver.

Dan

I know the delivery people are like UPS. They have a set route. They deliver that mail and they go home. Seems fair to me and unless they do something illegal they are doing their job.

--

Rick C

Tell me that doesn't fit the description of "paranoia"!

i assume the value of this item is high since it is a one-off at this point. So I don't see anything amiss of video taping the opening the box. I see no reason to think your customer screwing you.

--

Rick C

Your design time isn't wasted, you can build another. Likely you learned some things that will make the new one easier to build or work better.

--

Rick C

Never send anything you want to lose by USPS. I use only FedEx with

I see the mistake you made there, but I know what you mean . What you DON' T want to lose.

And with Fedex you better hope there is never a problem. We found out the h ard way when they damaged a nice Tandberg reel to reel. Their claims proces s is clumsy and requires alot of cooperation on the part of the recipient e ven though the sender is the one covered.

I had to make a claim with UPS for a projection CRT I shipped up to Michiga n or something, been a few years. I spent time on the packing and that invo lved wood and PVC tubing. They must have dropped it on its side from like s ix feet high to break the neck of the thing.

Their minimum is $100 which was nice because I only charged $50 for the par t. They paid the $100 after I showed them some shots of webpages with the p rices. We split the extra, but he still couldn't do a job that probably wou ld have netted him near $300.

So while their process of collecting is easier, I have heard that they do b reak more stuff. Some stuff, like you said, you simply do not want to lose. The OP here is talking about a prototype, there is no ordering on on eBay.

I wonder if it would help overinsuring the living sheepshit out of things. Remember the joke about the army insurance ?

It goes that they were selling new soldiers life insurance and one guy was selling policies like crazy. When asked how he did so well he said "Simple, I just tell them if they die in combat the government has to pay their fam ily a couple hundred bucks, with this policy they have to pay $250,000. Who do you think is going to get the more dangerous assignment ?"

Anyway, I wonder if there is any culpability on the part of employees who a ct like they're in that old Samsonite luggage commercial with the gorilla. I know it is not legal to charge them or take it out of their pay unless th ey got a certain kind of contract as self employed, but if there is enough of a trail that is one is found to be careless, they know who to fire.

One thing is sure, the price of what is in the package doesn't always matte r. What if it is a gift ? Then they don't have to pay ? Bullshit. And actua l value can mean alot of things.

For example, my Uncle had a bunch of old 8mm films my Grandfather had taken to be converted to DVD. What if they had lost those ? Absolutely irreplace able. I think there would be a lawyer involved, and this Uncle was no dummy either, when he had a house built he found out there was no legal easement for some utility company stuff and got three years off house payments over it, no interest or anything. We know how to pick lawyers. Still, if the in surance wasn't upped, a place like UPS would only be liable for a hundred b ucks.

So maybe that is the idea. I think it is only like two bucks per extra hund red. That is not alot. Pay twenty bucks to insure an old Buddy Holly album on the Decca label ? Sure. (extremely rare piece that)

I was thinking something like that, and isn't a large part of that design t ime prepaid anyway ? Do you just take an order and charge for the prototype ? If so I got some ideas. Lots of ideas.

In fact I really do have one pending but there is no rush and I am working it out as much as possible myself. I solved the problem of getting the righ t FET for it, I am just going to use a bank of them, maybe 12. That'll get me the low Rdson I need without using 30 amp devices I do not need.

But that brings us to the next point, I am a little leery of letting out to o much detail. So now the OP has a product that is probably not patented or copyrighted in the hands of who the hell knows ? There had to be something special about the thing if it couldn't be sources off the shelf.

Sometimes the intellectual property is worth more than the property. If it is patentable he might lose the right to patent it if someone else pays the hundred bucks. If that happens it is a bigger loss than a hunk of FR-4 and some transistors n shit. All depends on just what made a custom design nec essary.

If it was undertaken by contract, then the contract terms include (well, hopefully should include) a clear statement of who owns what, and when.

A typical design contract says, the party buying the service gets ownership and exclusive right, to the completed product presented at the design handoff.

If the subject is more like, the designer owns the IP, and made and sold a physical copy to another party, then the sale could be conducted under contract (i.e., including NDA terms and reservation of rights*), or implicit copyright of suitable parts (in the US). But you are correct, a design patent and/or registered copyright would be ideal.

*I don't know the extent to which this can be done. At a basic level, you're selling a product. In Europe, you're entitled to do anything you want with the thing you own. In the US, I think that's more-or-less true of basic physical items, but anything with the least bit of copyrightable material (say, a "hello world" inside a 4-bit MCU blinking an LED?) has to be licensed, and therefore you get into the superfluous EULA ecosystem we have today...

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Contract Design 
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

It was pretty much a textbook circuit. No super secrets here, it was simply a 4 -> 1 audio mixer consisting of 4 mono inputs with an active volume control on each, mixed in an inverting summer, and sent out in mono through a buffer designed to drive long cable. I used an LM386 (which I have a ton of in DIP form) as a virtual ground, and a cheap boost converter module to take the 9 volt battery voltage and step it up to 18 for the op amp supply to give more headroom, which I thought was sort of clever, but other than that there's nothing really innovative or patentable here.

The reason he wanted this is simply because he needed it to be super-compact, not much larger than a credit card, and there didn't seem to be anything on the market off the shelf that was quite right.

I'm working on a more polished second version with some more features that might be sale-able to a couple more interested parties, but I don't think this product is exactly going to set the world on fire.

Ah, so that's that, then. :-)

Tim

Maybe they should just rename that service "Click and Shread"? Hell, I can do that myself and save the $6.45 postage!