I’ve been thinking about the possibility of making motes ourselves. We have the open source circuit and board design for the telos. We could get the boards prototyped from one of the board building houses listed here, for example, such as Precision Technologies, which is geographically close (though I’m not sure that makes much difference). I suspect that the ultimate cost of these would be less than $5 per board.
We can get the chips from Newark or Digikey. I did a quick check and this would require a day or two of research to get exactly the right equivalences, but I came up with a total cost of $35 for the parts, not including all the resistors and capacitors, which are typically a couple cents each.
Mike and Tim were looking into modifying the Gerber files directly, which would allow us to do relatively simple things, like changing the layout of the USB to put on a USB-mini. To do bigger modifications, like incorporating the USB charging circuit and adding a connector for the iPod batteries, we should probably redraw the circuit in a software package like Eagle. The freeware version of Eagle that we currently have only supports 2-layer boards and the mote is a 4-layer board. We could go with the non-profit standard use for $125.
We’ll also print out a gerber file to make a 3-mil or 4-mil mylar stencil, which we can do either at the Engineering Prototyping shop on their laser printer, or order one for $25 from Pololu.
We can place the components on the board with tweezers under a microscope, then reflow the solder in our skillet or a $500 reflow oven.
