Coronavirus and impact to the project
Date: Sunday, July 12 2020 @ 22:38:28 UTC Topic: Amiga FPGA accelerator
As you are aware Covid-19 situation made huge problems to everyone. All this time I was thinking that this is something that will go away soon and be forgotten even quicker but I was wrong. I am facing problems regarding production for long period of time now. It is nearly impossible to maintain production of accelerators in large scale and it is getting harder and harder to source parts or to get them in time or at normal prices that were listed before. Parts and following materials, tools used in this project are sourced all over the world and without having all of them, precisely selected over the years accelerator cards won't have decent quality which is not an option. Everything was a problem, from sourcing something simple as ESD bags to more important stuff like genuine Amtech flux I needed. In such situation I have decided to stop production completely and wait. For nearly 3 months I was focused to help in other areas apollo-team had needs slowly collecting parts to run production again. And yes, it is getting better now but we are not even near to say that everything is back to normal. With all of the orders I m over 6 months behind so waiting time is getting more and more frustrating for everyone. With limited quantities of cards I was making I had to postpone any cooperation with Amiga shops and I m very sorry for that but I couldn't give them false promises because simply, I can't deliver anything in reasonable amount of time.
Situation is not so good with postal services too who are under big hit constantly changing their policies for sending or receiving parcels. My postal service like others had some strange calls so when epidemic started I could receive packages from China but not send them there. Strange? Right now I m able to send to USA but unable to receive anything from there. Chile is also forbidden in my post office and several other countries. Worst thing is that I pay for shipping and then after few days they call me to say that they can't send it to specific country each time keeping the money. On top of everything fraud investigation regarding wirecard bank, widely used by developers and parts suppliers created more troubles.
What can I say, strange times, people lose jobs and maybe best option for everyone is to save money for other priorities in life than on our hobbies. From my side I can only promise that production of all versions of Vampire accelerators will be continued soon I get all needed parts.
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