Following an explosion of social media posts and articles on retrorgb.com, hackaday.com and hackster.io, ATLANTIS for MiSTer sales skyrocketed this week. Such that what was 1-2 months of ATLANTIS stock last week was down to just 1 week on yesterdays trajectory! A frantic email to our supplier last night will hopefully mean no interruption to supply but please bear with us as we navigate uncharted waters :D
On the shipping side we are finding the following average delivery times;
Australia 2-3 days
USA 5-7 days
EU 9+ days
Australia Post is reporting limited flights hampering EU deliveries to some countries but rest assured they will get there (one of our very first orders from March 4th was only delivered to its destination address in Germany today, the 17th). If this proves to be an ongoing issue I will certainly look to alternative shipping options; Australia Post is just very convenient for bulk lodging of parcels and is relatively cheap.
Speaking of parcel lodgement; due to the influx of orders I have needed to batch fulfillments. Any orders placed before 0700 AEDT (Berlin 2100 CET, New York 1600 EDT, San Francisco 1300 PDT) will be lodged at the post office that morning and processed for departure at the Australia Post facility on the same business day.
We had a fun Pi day, spreading the word about how to utilise the solderable breadboard component of the ATLANTIS to mount a Raspberry Pi. This is one of the most exciting parts of what we're doing - to see what all the makers can come up with on their ATLANTIS boards.
On the technical side there've been no major updates to the website since my last blog except for a hopefully higher resolution of the schematic image in the FAQ.
We've also had a few enquiries about options for IO shields...
As you might have noticed from all of the images shared so far - there's no IO shield covering the rear of the PC cases. This is largely due to the endless possibilities of ports and their positions that might exist on an ATLANTIS carrier board. Even within the same device stack, say a DE10-Nano and analog IO, issues with a preconfigured IO shield might arise if one stack is mounted on the surface of the ATLANTIS versus another being mounted from the underside or any variation in between - at least 3-4mm vertical misalignment in such a case. Certainly if a common layout or layouts is determined in the coming weeks, we will look to provide an IO shield for it. In the meantime, some alternative options would include customisable IO shields or mesh shields available on AMAZON or Etsy; where you can neatly cut holes for the ports in your system. If you have a definite layout you could even 3D print a panel with port holes to suit. Fortunately IO shields all follow the ATX specification so can be shared across cases - except for half height "Thin" Mini-ITX (see our previous blog post on PC cases...).
That's all from me for this week and once again thanks so much for your support. A couple of our customers have even gone as far as adding tips to their orders which is INCREDIBLE and really helps with our ongoing efforts for product development.
Have a good weekend and happy MiSTer gaming.
Shane