This is an interesting idea:
http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2009/03 ... dware.html

too much text for now.
simple wiki pls?

Basically, from what I can gather, think of it like a place where you can spec out a board, and get a bunch of people together to print it. You then submit it to the bank and they take your order, print double of what you need and split the cost savings w/ you. They can then sell the remaining boards through a retail type branch. You can also "Invest" money w/ them which will earn a certain rate of return, and they use that invested money as capital to pay for the ordered boards.

I saw this too, but I didn't understand it so well. I'm okay up to this point...



...but this I missed. Did you find that someplace else? It seems like a reasonable way for things to work out for them, but what about for me? Did I just sign over to them the right to create and sell as many of my boards as they want from now on? Did they "loan" me the money to buy the other half of the boards, and then they resell them to recoup the losses? What if I want to flat out make some money using them as a front-end? Can I front 50% of the cost for new boards, have them front the other 50%, then sell all the boards I order through their webshop and make a small profit?

I love the idea, just the same. The Ardunio shield I suggested making for LCD driving (I just bought a buttload of parts from Mouser tonight with the proceeds of the sale of my World of Warcraft account, by the way)(or ANY Arduino shield within the standard footprint, for that matter) runs $12.38 if purchased at qty 25 from PCB123.com (or $7.04 if you're willing to sacrifice soldermask and silkscreen). If these guys bought another 25 to push the volume up to 50, it drops to $7.68 with soldermask or $5.43 without. Assuming we pay for our 25 and they pay for their 25, we'd save $117, on the boards alone. If we went in on components too we'd probably save a bit more still- it's harder to know with components. For instance, tonight I priced out some micros on Digikey and at qty 25 they dropped by 50%! Mouser, however, had them for 60% of Digikey's single qty price from the get-go, so...

At any rate, I'm definitely going to check these guys out. I want to see my LCD board get made, along with the other crazy things I'm coming up with. I'll put up a post in the other section about those.

Congratulations -- that's the most productive use of WoW I've ever heard of.

K, I don't know where I came up w/ the retail aspect of it. Guess I just inferred it. I don't honestly know where they'd see their ROI come from. They pay for half the boards... and then do what w/ them?

That was my original question- although I think your supposition that they sell 'em at a slight profit, then distribute the profits to the investors, is probably the right one.

I definitely want to contact them.