Electronic Hardware Purchases

We service popular electronic gear no longer supported by the original manufacturer. We are a mail-in repair shop. For small and lightweight items, mail-in works great. For large and heavy items, shipping costs can be prohibitively expensive. To reduce these costs by around 90%, we work on the circuit boards in the equipment. This means you don’t have to pay to ship the enclosure, power supplies, speakers, keybeds, and other large and heavy items. This only works if we have our own host equipment we can plug your circuit boards into.

Sometimes, we need especially expensive equipment for our operations. The latest example is a universal IC programmer, which we need to read and program all kinds of ICs that were common in the 1970s and ’80s. Modern inexpensive programmers do not read or program these devices.

We are using crowdfunding as an important part of our equipment funding strategy. Your donations help us to purchase these large, heavy, and expensive electronics and expand our service offerings. The host equipment we’re looking for is listed in the table below. The budget is our best guess at what it may cost us to purchase it. When purchases are made, the campaign goal is adjusted according to what we actually paid. See Activity for the current state of the campaign goal.

In addition to crowdfunding, we contribute 50% of all non-crowdfunding donations to the equipment purchase fund. When we manage to purchase a piece of equipment, 25% of all related company gross profits are contributed until it is paid off. These contributions will be reflected in the activity ledger annually when we do our taxes.

Please visit our GoFundMe page to donate today! Better yet, if you have a lead on one that hasn’t been purchased yet, please let us know using our tips line.

Picture	Host Equipment Description	Budget / Balance
	eeTools TopMax II Programmer We were originally looking for the Dataman 48Pro2 IC Programmer, but we got a deal on the eeTools TopMax II. We needed this to be able to program bipolar PROMs and PALs. We have a XGecu TL866-II Plus, but it doesn't handle everything. Many of our retro computing support offerings depend on having a device programmer like this. We recently built an ME1702/A and an ME2700 programmer to handle the original EPROM families such as the 1702 and 2708. Added 2021-03-24. Removed 2021-07-30.	Purchased!
	Korg BX-3, 2002 Version Second-generation Korg BX-3 from the 2000s. It doesn’t need to be pretty. In fact, it doesn’t even have to work. Scratches, dents, bangs, and other cabinet damage is fine, but it does need to have all its major parts. A few missing screws or broken keys are OK. Added 2020-09-16.	Budget: 1,195 USD
	Korg CX-3, 2002 Version Second-generation Korg CX-3 from the 2000s. Added 2020-09-16. Purchased 2020-09-29.	Purchased! Balance: 292 USD

Activity Ledger

This ledger shows all the activity of the campaign with the more recent transactions at the top. When a piece of equipment is added to the goal, its budget amount is added. When a piece of equipment is purchased, the equipment’s original goal amount is subtracted and the purchase amount (after fees) is added to keep the campaign goal consistent with the outstanding budget and actual purchases. This is why the campaign goal doesn’t “reset” when purchases are made. For example, if a piece of equipment is purchased below the budget amount, the campaign goal amount goes down.

The campaign goal is always the sum of the purchases (USD) to date plus the support list budget.

Voting

Here are the latest results from donor’s votes for host equipment they’d like us to support. To vote, simply add a comment to your donation or visit our Feedback page. When we get 10 or more votes, the item is moved to the host equipment list and the campaign goal is adjusted.

When we have sufficient funds to purchase equipment from the list, we first choose the item with the most votes. In the case of a tie, we choose the item that’s been voted on most recently.