Dongle news and price discount!
To celebrate the achievement of soldering together my 500th card reader emulator dongle I've decided to knock £5 off the price for the rest of March.
The promotional price is available from the PachiTalk auction listing and from the new store page on my website. This discount combined with the current favourable exchange rate means that this is the lowest price the dongles have been offered to US buyers and is equivalent to a 40% discount on the USD purchase price from two years ago!
Also it is likely that shipping rates will have to go up in April. I have tried to resist increasing these in line with the post office rises for the past two years, but I don't think I can absorb another one.
This milestone also means an end to the current design of dongle as I will now need to order a new batch of printed circuit boards, so will be taking advantage of this to make a few design changes. There are no major functional differences planned, as any big changes would be likely to push the price up (which I really don't want to do) so the new version is planned to offer identical functionality to the current version.
The new design is mainly to allow me to optimise it for ease of manufacturing, as the current version is a bit time consuming to assemble. This was my biggest oversight with the original design. I wasn't expecting them to be as popular as they have turned out to be, so I traded a $50 saving in PCB manufacturing costs and a 50 cents per unit saving on the bill of materials for a few awkwardly placed components and more manual assembly. This would have been fine if I was just making a dozen or two for friends, but they are really annoying when you're dealing with batch sizes of 100 units.
There will also be some improvements to the power circuits, adding voltage regulation to the VL supply. This should fix the incompatibility with Sanyo machines that can cause the shooter handle to stop working, and means that I won't have to stock a modified version of the dongle for the affected machines.
If anyone has any requests or ideas for changes that could be easily incorporated into the dongle's design, then feel free to post them here or send me an email or PM. I need to revisit the software to optimise it for a newer version of the microprocessor chip, so might be able to sneak a few minor upgrades in there as well.
I'll post in a separate thread about the development of version 2.0 once I have a hardware design finalised and prototyped. There will probably be a call for some beta testers at this point as well (so owners of Sanyo machines take note).
Finally, I'd like to express my sincere thanks to all of my customers for their continued support, and an extra special thanks go out to Tulsa and Sid for the existence of PachiTalk and the auction site, without which this project would never have reached this milestone.
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