Foley's Christmas

All the sales receipts for all orders received today by 10am CDT are done. I do seem to be having an issue with emails being rejected as spam but I am not getting the notices. Please verify your email addresses and make sure that the sales address is included in your safe senders list.

I just got a notice from UPS that the last of the Renard parts have arrived. I will need one evening to split up all the RS485 chips as they are small qty and that’s a lot of cuts in tubes. The LEDs will take an hour or so but you should start seeing shipping notices this weekend. Now I start from the top of the list and go down. If you ordered at the beginning, then you get first dibs! PLEASE PAY THE QUOTES PROMPTLY!! I have had packed boxes sitting in my wife’s sitting room for weeks sometimes waiting on the shipping cost payments. She is going to make me fire myself if this continues! lol

Now one note that I forgot to tell everyone. The REN64XC has two side entry RJ45 jacks on the bottom for RS485/232 communications. Given the way this board is installed in the enclosure, I replaced these with top entry ones. They fit in the same holes without any problems. If you MUST have the side entry ones, please let me know as I do have a few around. I neglected to mention this up front

Also, some bags in the Kits have more than one part in them. These will be EASILY recognizable like a 1/4W resistor and an 1/8W resistor in the same bag (HINT..the larger one is the 1/4W ) These bags will have multiple labels on them so you know what you can expect.

I have had only one person asked for programmed PICs. This is reminder that I do not program these unless you have specifically asked for it. This includes the PICs in the spare parts kits. Everyone doing this needs to be able to program their own!!! I actually have only one copy of a HEX file that I know positively that works and its for 115k baudrate that I use in my show.

Watch your emails!!!!

The final parts for this years REN64XC Co-Op should be here tomorrow. One shipment from Texas and one from Memphis, TN are the final bits. I finished sorting all the PICs that came in and they are ready to go as well. For those of you wanting the extra kits, stay tuned for the announcement on DIYC later this week.

Half of the Vampire Plugs and SPT2 have been spoken and paid for. This pre-order pricing is available for three more days only. Get em while they are cheap!

okay…the problem vendor has been fired and I have demanded a refund. I am short the ST485BNs..and I have them in stock at several vendors. I also have the rectangular LEDs sourced. There will be a new order placed today one way or another. I should have the parts on MONDAY. I will then begin to ship out each order in the order that they came in.

I will also release the extra kits for sale but I will not do anything with the orders until the pre-sale orders go out.

On the Vampire Plug front….the vendor has our down payment…we are now committed as $7k is gone to China lol.

Hmm, things just got ugly – See the quote below. I am ordering the PICs from a new vendor right now. I hope to have all of these by the end of this week. This has been a literal nightmare for me and I hope that everyone understands. However, some good news…I have opened the Vampire Plug Co-Op page!

The PIC parts that we received came in as Fakes. I am not able to get the in a timely manner. I have released the %%%%% and the %%%%’s today. They are in shipping as I write. I will advise tracking this afternoon.

At this time since we are having such issues with these PIC parts I am going to have to close out that item. I am determining the credit amount owed to you and will advise that number shortly for your records. My main system is down for a few hours due to a neighborhood power outage. They are saying not up till 2pm MST.

I do apologize for the issues with this PIC part. It has been a nightmare on our end and therefore on your end! Currently %%%%% has over 8K of these item on shelf for a very similar pricing. I hope they can full fill your need. Again I apologize.

No, I do not mean the end of the world! I am still out of town and will return in the next week. I should have all the parts in (will follow up with the vendor on Tuesady). Then I will begin shipping the orders in the order that they were received.

For those of you looking for the leftovers (yes I have some to sell), I am not listing these until the pre-orders are taken care of. Its just not fair to them to keep them hanging while I work on others.

I appreciate everyone’s patience as one vendor has really given me the run around this year.

I have been sending out enclosure order only orders for a while. This weekend I realized that all the parts I am now waiting on are for the Renards. So anyone who has SSRez or SSRez and Enclosure orders should be getting shipping estimates. I have two more left to go for now. If you have gotten an estimate, please pay the amount promptly as this means the box is sitting my study…and my wife is looking at me with “that look”!

Just for grins and giggles, here are a couple of photos. The first is 1500 SSRez PCBs and 100 Renard 64XC boards as I received them. The second is my living room full of sorted parts. It is in front of my fireplace so you can appreciate the scale of the works!

SSRez PCBs and Renard 64XC PCBs

Parts for the Co-Op Sorted and Bagged

I got a delivery date for the PICs as latest May 4th. My trip offshore has been delayed so the parts will come in while I am gone. I will finish packing and sorting every part that I have before I leave. That leaves me about 3-4 hours of sorting when the final three parts come in.

I finally got some answers out of what has gone wrong at our vendor for the parts. They were using a 14 year old inventory software system that basically crashed on them. They are now inputting thousands of parts, customers and vendors into the system BY HAND. It seems that many of the parts that “were in” were in fact the wrong parts due to data entry errors (got this from the founder of the company who is now helping with the operations to get everything straightened out).

In short, all of my missing parts (replacements or otherwise) are in route to the warehouse (RS485 chips arrived but were wrong…LEDs arrived but were also wrong). This shipment should be to me by the end of next week. Now that really does not help at the moment as I will not be able to do anything with these until May 20th. All the other parts are sorted, labeled and bagged. I just need to get these done and start shipping. I apologize for the delay but this his what happens when we try to keep the cost at a pure minimum.

By some…I mean TRIACs. I got a partial order of these in Friday and they are sorted, labeled and ready to pack. I am still missing the PICs, the RS485 chips and the Rectangular LEDs. I am calling the vendor daily now but I am not happy with the response that I am getting.

I wish I had better news. In fact, I have to head offshore on Thursday for 28 days. This was never supposed to be a problem as all the parts were only “two weeks”. That was over 8 weeks ago Please stay tuned as I hope to have more information today. For those of you who are working with James, he was able to bypass some of this because he is running second coop for the SS Rens…I do not have this luxury and am pretty much stuck ATM.