Thanks to everybody for support. This Forum is really great!

Erik, shame on me. This project is full of delays and I am at the end of the food - sorry, supplier - chain, the stupid programmer, sitting here and having nothing to program, while slowly skidding out of any scheduled time...

Each step of this project went like: "Oh, we can do it by XXXX", and when XXXX approached an nothing happened, upon a call "Oh, we have some minor technical problems, it will be delayed by a few (days/weeks)".

So, we ended up with partially populated boards ("Oh, we can get you the whole BOM by XXX", "oh we could not get some connectors" (standard stuff, we have them on stock, go on populate it without connectors we can solder them anytime - and when the boards came, resistors, 5 types of ICs and a few other things were missing. Etc.etc.).

After a week's search for the resistors (meantime we salvaged some 8-pin 4R types from old motherboards and squeezed them in place of those 16-pin 8R-s), we ended up negotiating with a bulk distributor, who - after several times attempting to sell us the 8-pin 4R types - came with "Oh, we do have these 10-pin 8R-s on stock, they're here within 2 days". That was on Friday. Today he told, they are on 10-weeks allocation.

These 10-pin 8-R types have different pitch than the 8-pin 4-Rs, otherwise I would have soldered them already "vertically", and hand-connected the common pin by a fine wire. These are really densely packed Rs, so I am not sure whether we would be able to pack them up from "standard" resistors (0402 or such - we don't these either but maybe we could get them more easier).

This in fact is a project of my colleague and I am only trying to speed things up. Another problem is that he is sick since Monday and I will need to break into his computer tomorrow to get the exact part numbers and pitch and the values. We have no problem purchase them anywhere by any (reasonable) means, but we are really playing for time now; that's why I asked for help here.


So, thanks to all again, I will come back tomorrow with the numbers.

Jan Waclawek