So I’m considering basing a product on the photon. Your site talks about using the Photon for prototyping, and transitioning to the P0 or P1 for production. I don’t think I want to get into SMD soldering, etc, that I think the P0/P1 would require - at least for the near term. Once the Photon starts shipping in March, what do you expect the availability to be for people like me that want to use it in a production device?
Hi! March will be preorder fulfillment and April’s likely to be the second run of preorders, followed by shipping on a first-come basis. Post-preorder we’ll generally have them in stock, though depending on your volumes it may not be as many as you need without some forewarning.
The safest, easiest course of action for production with Photon is to give us 6-8 weeks’ notice (at minimum) so that your order is considered in our forecasting. Feel free to message me with your email and we’ll get you all set up.
Cheers!
Ok, I PM’d you, thanks!
And as per my PM, if you could point me to something that explains what is needed to integrate the P0 into a custom board to “build my own” Photon, and what the supporting circuitry is, I’d appreciate it. Is there a writeup on that somewhere? Sorry, I’ve looked around the site and can’t find anything. And am I correct in thinking it would need to involve SMD components? I can handle building and soldering on a non SMD PC board, but SMD is something I’m probably not ready for.
Sure, all the details you need are in the Photon repository. Does require some Eagle knowledge to really implement, and definitely SMD for the P0 part. We encourage people to switch to the P0/P1 over 10,000 units, but that’s not a hard line and at lower volumes it’s probably not worth the engineering effort to get the cost savings.
I’m ok on Eagle, but not SMD. Glad to know I can just use the Photon.
Thanks!