|darc| wrote:mellott124 wrote:|darc| wrote:Hi there,
At the moment, a friend of mine is currently in talks with a Chinese manufacturer to get these connectors made. We expected to have a quote months ago, but coronavirus interfered with those plans.
However, we planned to do a group buy where other people could purchase connectors. I don't know if you are aware or not but there are many more uses for these connectors than just the link cable so I fear you are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to not make your connectors available for purchase by themselves if you are looking to reduce cost by increasing volume.
At the moment the cheapest PC-DC development link is less than $5 in parts to solder a serial-USB interface but we really need a plug-and-play connector for this so we have a better off-the-shelf option for development than the ~$150 broadband adapter.
In addition, the Dreamcast and Arduino basically speak the same serial language so I imagine some homebrew developers would love to get connectors available so they can interface any kind of Arduino accessory to the Dreamcast.
We can also make better quality SD card adapters, MIDI cables, Neo Geo cables, etc.
If that works out that would be great for the Dreamcast community. I’m guessing that you’d need to have 100,000 or more made to get them to bite. For the cost of what people will want to pay for a connector only, it doesn’t make sense for my solution. It would make sense for a machine manufactured solution.
For now I’ll continue with the carbon fiber printed cable because, more times than not, these things don’t pan out like people hope. If it does work out then I won’t have to hand build cables and I’m OK with stopping at that point.
I think perhaps you misunderstood the intention of my post -- in no way am I suggesting you should not proceed with the carbon fiber printed cable (that would be a dick thing to suggest, lol), but it's more of a suggestion that you include an option for buying 1connector at like half the price. Because I agree that there's a very good chance the price of getting these made in China will be out of range of what we could do. I think you might be surprised what people are willing to pay for a connector only. I've already purchased a Neo-Geo cable in the past at $50 only to harvest its connector, for example, which is a very cheap price for that cable... and at your price point I could get one for $42.50 if I bought a cable and chopped it up.
It's hard to tell from the pictures, how easy will it be to open the connectors? Will the cables be fully pinned?
Let me get the parts in and see how it goes. I'll consider this.
It won't be easy to open up my cable. The glue that I use to bond the cable is quite a strong bond. More times than not it splits the connector housing plastic before the glue lets loose.