In order to keep the costs of Bootstrap to the minimum a lot of parts have been ordered from unfamiliar overseas vendors via Ebay. This has mostly worked out but there have been a number of problems from a wide variety of causes. I’m not intending to publicly recommend or condemn particular vendors (builders should e-mail me at bill@robot50.org for purchasing advice), but instead to illustrate some of the issues and problems encountered by moving quickly while keeping ultimate build costs low.

•  When ordering parts from Asia for delivery to the US, delivery times are significant. My experience has been two to four weeks, mostly closer to four full weeks. In some cases even longer. The estimates provided for delivery dates are in a broad range and tracking is not precise. This poses a problem when trying to move quickly. Sometimes by the time a part arrived I had already moved on in the design and it was no longer needed for the project.
• Some parts are of completely inferior build quality. I received a small batch of piezo buzzers (I think it was $1 for 5 buzzers). Half of them fell apart in my hands before I even tried to insert them into the prototyping board.
• Some parts are assembled OK but are just not adequate to the task they are advertised for. My previous post discussing IR sensors provides an example. The sensor may be sold as “ardiuno/robot/smart car” suitable but that doesn’t mean that it is. Prior to starting work on Bootstrap I bought a similar kit that is widely advertised on ebay and elsewhere. It was horrible, even for the price. I tried to use just the wheels and motors on the first prototype but even that was unacceptable.
• In a couple of instances the part was simply not delivered. In one case a US vendor offering “fast and free” shipping only delivered half my order after weeks and then insisted that I received everything I ordered. Ebay was very good about refunding my money in these cases and needless to say, I left negative reviews on these people.

In most cases I started by purchasing a quantity of one from a particular vendor and in all cases keep my expenditure to a few dollars until I had a good experience with them. Probably 90% of my transactions have gone off with no problems. So ebay is a great, if imperfect resource.

I surprisingly helpful resource has been my Amazon Prime account. Prime charges a yearly membership fee and items bought through Prime are generally more expensive than the same item bought off of Amazon without the Prime service. However I can get a $2.5 bag of 100 screws delivered in 48 hours with a Prime account. That really helps deal with the long delays using ebay and is a very good deal when the costs of the Prime account are spread over enough purchases.

Working under the “fail fast” approach, a bunch of the stuff purchased was the wrong size (I wasn’t paying close enough attention) or didn’t get used because the design changed. Again, spending a bit more per item to buy a small quantity up front and find out that it is a fail quickly has kept the costs of these mistakes (in money and time) very low. I am sure I will use most of this stuff for other projects someday anyway.