Hi everyone, Segasonicfan Designs here (the designer of the
Virtual Ribbon):
First and foremost, thank you
@Another World for the shoutout! That was really nice of you to promote what I'm developing for the community
Second - Thanks to the supporters and fans that encourage this work - I really couldn't do it without you!
Third - Cost concerns. I really hear ya folks, I never want to charge more than necessary for PCBs. I've been active in the online gaming / modding scene for 15+ years and I remember those times in high school when I was soldering motherboard add-ons and emailing people like
JROK and
Viletim for any possible discounted PCBs (they both were super nice to me). I didn't understand their prices and shared similar frustrations. I am a small designer working out of my home and am not making any of the big bucks. I'd like to share some info that may help:
1. I spent over a year and hunderds of hours of work fine-tuning this design through many iterations.
(you can see some of the steps in the
History of the Virtual Ribbon section
here).
2. While these PCBs look simple on the surface, they are not as simple as you might expect. The cables and plugs are completely non-standard (keep in mind the VB is 25+ years old now) and have to be special ordered and have a much larger than usual markup. Also, due to fairly small and unpredictable demand, I don't get bulk discounts.
3. A lot of time is spent answering emails and customer concerns, managing shipping, developing how-tos, install videos, etc. It's surprising how much work there is beyond the cost of materials.
4. I'm offering a steep discount for installation of these PCBs, which is far below my usual rate of repair work.
5. For anyone unable to afford the current v3.0, v3.1+ official release, I still have v2.0 prototypes which I can sell at a significant discount (although, not with any support or guarantees of course - they are protos but they tested fine for me).
JROK and Viletim sold me discount prototypes back in the day, and I'd be happy to do the same thing. Fortunately, I've gotten a lot of support and enough orders to ship a nice batch around the world. So thank you everyone! Looking forward to healing some damaged VBs out there