Concept: A VESC supplier minus the profits

Can some one help me find each product number for the parts?

I’ve found the gerber files and such but to get a quote I’ll need the item names and numbers. I have a serious lead on a supplier.

I’m going with a first run of 100 orders

You can find the BOM in the master.zip

Get ready for some shockingly high prices. Vedder spec’s the VESC with premium components. You will need to use garbage components to get down to $60 per VESC.

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I’m willing to pay up to 70 or more

Thanks

Ive contacted alot of these 3rd party company from us, china, netherlands up to indonesia. The cheapest with decent build you can get is from china - indonesia.

Since I am from Indonesia by origins and my uncle own a large company manufacturing diesel generator, I could found and use their conncetions to manufacture esc.

VESC manufacturing is expensive in terms components, the lowest I could get with minimum effort and price as I remembered is around 70 - 80 usd for about 100 orders exc caps, heat shrink and cable. I could even ask firmware installation for free. When there are more price goes lower each time with modifications that can be applied ie adding plastic or metal cover around vesc. When constant manufacturing is at hand, can have special assembly lines that can produce up to 3000 vesc in a day.

What is nice is that price for fixing broken vesc is only abou 10-30usd each exc shipping. The best part about paying this is that you get brand new Vesc instead of repair the broken piece and send you back the item.

I could get more specific numbers ofc, but I stopped there as I dont have the time yet to further process this. However if some people are interested, I could get some note.

The crazy part that I could push further is that I could even do some improvement on VESC through some engineers in my uncle factory and or the vesc assembly line if things get serious.

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Yes thank you for that I need some positivity here.

I’ve been told that if the caps were put onto the board instead of being hand soldered on the ores then it would save a significant amount of money per esc. That would require a slight redesign. Please get some figures from whole ever you can I’ll compare with my numbers.

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You need to do one order from Mouser and one from Element14. Mouser doesn’t have all the parts.

Great idea, A LOT OF WORK… Not to mention money output… I am totally in to buy 2 or 4… But how would you sell 100? For no profit… You would have to put all of the money upfront… and then hope you sell them all to make no money… An if u decide u want to make money for all of your work, you will need to pay Vedder… (Not sure what his policy is for his designs)… Like I said I would buy some… But selling 100 and what if you get them and there is a defect?? All of your money is gone… Good luck and let me know if this goes through… I am interested to see what the future holds…

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I say you should go for it, only then you will understand how complex, costly, annoying, painful & risky it is… yolo

Just remember one tiny mistake and your entire order can be worthless… its only money though! maybe $7 or $8K worth of parts & labor down the drain, so if you are willing to loose that it’s a risk worth taking.

I am onto about my 5 or 6th batch now & 4th supplier & 3rd country of manufacture… every single order/supplier has had some issue that takes hours-&-hours & many-many $$$ to resolve…

If the supplier says it will take 4 weeks to produce it actually means 8-10 weeks, assuming there are no shortages on components, which there always is. Add another 4 weeks if you want samples first. Each sample will probably cost $300 Each

Also, after delivery of your VESC product, you will now be responsible (24/7) for ensuring every single person’s ‘experimental’ DIY electric skateboard works perfectly & if you can’t fix it people will start defaming you and dishing shit on you & probably demanding a full refund.

Other VESC suppliers will instantly hate you and start claiming that you are incompetent & your vesc is rubbish. Other fanboy forums members will also jump on the shaming bandwagon and start publicly announcing to the world that your product is rubbish too, mostly cause they can’t work out how to use it themselves. Even though there’s nothing actually wrong with the product.

You will write many articles & make countless videos to help people but it won’t matter… you are the supplier and everything is your fault. Even if the customer clearly shorts it out themselves!

Before all this happens a large portion of your customers will also probably get pissed off waiting and put in credit card chargebacks or PayPal disputes to pull their investment just before you need to pay your supplier.

If you are really unlucky they will wait until they get the product in hand then put in a PayPal dispute, this way they get the product & get their money back too! I call it fraud but Paypal always favors the buyer.

Once you get through the 20 or 30 emails each day asking for a firm delivery date, you will have time to sit back and realise you did this all for free! in fact you may have lost some coin along the way.

so yeah go for it!

meanwhile @chaka & I will sit back and count our massive fortune from selling VESC… NOT!

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Well then, I will think that I will stick with the usual suppliers.

If you read the topic it’s not about saving money. It’s about having another supplier to keep up with demand

Obviously there has to be a change in vesc production. Unless you are all fine waiting between batches. Production needs to go larger.

And of course vedder gets his share for designing it (that was addressed earlier)

i am in the process of making 1000…

Go big or go home right @onloop

Trust me when I say that I hate waiting too… None of the VESC suppliers are trying to be out of stock…

do you have any idea how hard it is to run a business when you are constantly out of stock?.. I have been trying for 12 months to keep the VESC in stock, slowly increasing order size… even when ordering batches of 250 didn’t resolve the problem. Now 1000 should, but maybe not.

I have electronics kits that I want to sell but can’t because I can’t even supply the individual vesc orders!

demand has outstripped supply constantly…

I am working hard to resolve it… trust me.

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Sounds like a plan. More power to ya

Anyway… i suggest you give it a go… yolo

Eventually i may stop selling it as a stand-alone part…

IMO the vesc needs to be a part of a well designed & complete propulsion system… it’s not great as a separate product… too easy to fuck it up with wrong motors, wrong settings, wrong battery etc…

In a complete kit it will be nearly bullet proof. It’s moving away from DIY a bit but reliability is king!

One way or another theres alot of things I have to agree with what @onloop said about vesc manufacturing. To begin with VESC is not a cheap products by its self (low volume), according to the supplier I contacted supplying is not a big issue. Again I never did test order, so supplier can always say shit. Then theres version issues that needs to be dealt with (what happen when vedder suddenly release version 5).

The chances of error is big, the profit margin are fairly small in conjunction to it. If you see the rc industry, they are retailing double to almost tripple price compared to wholesale cost. So I could understand the struggle @chaka and @onloop are dealing with. Getting away from producing vesc is not an option as it helps drive their business of selling esk8 parts, in which leads us to dead brick when we have to create our own quality esk8.

Every business has risk, all business man job is to deal with it. Its not easy, but not impossible. When the time is right (getting new website and start selling to cover vesc manufacture cost), I will try to get my hands dirty.

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So you guys mention people who have done it and done a few runs. Of course, if you do a group buy hopefully the person who does ship out has done all this leg work and is responsible if it doesn’t turn out proper.

I think people fail to mention that Onloop, Chaka and myself take this “failure” upon ourselves to clean up if need be.

One person is in-charge of all this extra effort work for the community. That’s testing, working with the vendors and shipping out, answering emails, re-shipping an item if the fault is due to the post office.

Sure, the person in-charge of the group buy is on the line but nowhere near as crucial as Enertion, Chaka, myself and any other vendors.

So in actuality, what are you really saving $20-30 for what could be 30 minutes to 2 hours of someone else’s time? It won’t last long.

Vedder did offer it at cost in the beginning but he stopped. For the exact same reason, it’s a ton of work. He has modifications which are better for his time than shipping out and answering shipping emails on the VESC.

What you guys are forgetting is a non-profit company isn’t necessarily a non-profit company. Sure, at the end of the year they claim no profit but the company does grow. The employees themselves are not working for free. Everyone has bills to pay. Time is always money even in a non-profit. The CEO’s do earn $200-350k/year and well over.

In the end, how many VESC’s will you need within the year? Will you actually be saving?

You guys in the end aren’t really saving much if you do the calculations and time added. The VESC is actually priced as a benefit to everyone. We aren’t really making a killing if even. It’s to better the community and promote the hobby.

My first batch of VESC’s sold out before they were ordered. Which was still unexpected considering Chaka and Onloop are already selling.

Onloop is purchasing a huge batch and the next batch of my own will be even bigger than my first.

Not sure if you guys are also aware… Benjamin Vedder has been working on VESC 5.0 which will be a 2 piece board for better modular configurations, etc. This new VESC will be more expensive but it will be better in the long run.

You can try going USA manufactured as well but half of the USA manufactured companies have businesses in Taiwan, China, etc. So USA manufactured isn’t always in the USA. Go figure…

Give it 1-3 months and you’ll have more then enough VESC’s in stock than you’ll know what to do with…

Growing pains… growing pains.

Wish you guys all the luck though if someone does decide to venture out on the project.

I just recently added 10awg wires, XT90 connectors to my entire setups + VESC… It’s amazing how much a small change can add to pricing.

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LOL that really hit home. I used to be one of those claiming rubbish until I decided to build a couple of vescs for myself and experiencing first hand how difficult it is. Respect to all who decide to build vescs for the community !

Well the nice part about manufacturing own vesc from my perspective is not about price, but more into availability. What I mean by availability is that I always have vesc around, be able to repair them and when problems occur I do not need to wait. Either it’s waiting time for contacting seller, explaining the problem, waiting for next batch, delayed shipment and stopped by customs asking for extra VAT.

However after I did my numbers with the pros and cons, I have to agree with @treenutter it’s better to arrange bulk order from the current vesc supplier for now especially if you are within the same region.

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