Does "Baite" still make Maple Minis

If the photo is accurate, eBay seller “gc_supermarket” (a good, fairy reliable, long-time seller), has them:

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/351590646697 (they were on sale for $3.77 when I grabbed them a few days ago…)

The photo is pretty fuzzy, and it might be “you will receive a board -like- this” idea!

The reason I’m investigating this, is because Baite appeared to be the original manufacturer, and buying directly from their online store seemed to guarantee that you were not getting a reject / reworked board.

RogerClark wrote:The reason I’m investigating this, is because Baite appeared to be the original manufacturer, and buying directly from their online store seemed to guarantee that you were not getting a reject / reworked board.

my guess is there is still quite a lot in the ‘supply chain’, i’ve recently got a piece from ebay
hence they may start another run when stocks start to ‘taper out’, the price of MM is nearly doubled that of BP, hence my guess is that it is still pretty profitable for them to make MM

Assuming this is there real home page then the last ‘What’s new!’ post was from 2010.

Riva wrote:Assuming this is there real home page then the last ‘What’s new!’ post was from 2010.

Riva wrote:Assuming this is there real home page then the last ‘What’s new!’ post was from 2010.

oh found it, it is filed under “robot module”, little wonder it’s so hard to find, somehow they associated maple minis with robots than with arduino

https://www.aliexpress.com/store/group/ … 08341.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/produc … 84783.html

and to give a sense of the physical location of baite
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/contac … 12021.html
https://goo.gl/maps/gpaRYN8SKGy

oh and in your original link
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/213957 … 0.0.B6zTPg
and next click ‘arduino related’
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/group/ … 93328.html
i guess they have re-stocked, it is probably too popular that it is ‘flying off the shelves’, and my guess is someone from there read this post/thread

Thanks

I think I many contact Baite via AliExpress, perhaps I can get them to start using the latest bootloader

I’ve emailed Baite Online Store on AliExpress, just to say hello and also to point out all the links in their Maple mini product description are out of date as they reference Leaflab’s website
I also pointed out the bootloader they still pre-install is the old version and they may as well use the new one.

I got a short reply to say they will refer the details to their “engineer”, but I’ve no idea if they will take any notice

If I could contact whoever makes the BluePill, I’d also tell them to pre-flash the bootloader rather than the flashing LED program they sometimes use, but AFIK the BluePill is made by “VccGnd” and they are only on TaoBao (they also have a website but it seems to be broken most of the time)

i think ‘baite’ would indeed contact their ‘engineer’, it is somewhat hard to tell how those ‘engineers’ work with baite e.g. if they may actually be ‘free lancers’. but it’d also be likely that some of those ‘engineer’ are in-house ‘engineers’ possibly dealing with production
‘baite’ and ‘vccgnd’ seemed to be producing boards in rather large volumes. they are possibly comparable to the european/us ‘counterparts’ e.g. olimex, raspberry pi and various others (i could even say sparkfun and adafruit) etc who have smt machines and decided to mass produce these and sell them

the main thing lacking with some (i think quite a lot) of the chinese manufacturers is that they provides little if any proper schematics and manuals at all.
some of them seem to bundle some stm hal examples etc rather than do up ‘proper schematics’, ‘manuals’ etc
as for maple mini, it so happens that it is open sourced in the first place. but blue pill do have schematics by ‘vccgnd’ hence ‘vccgnd’ is possibly working ‘more formally’ like the ‘european counterparts’. thoughts are just that they should make an effort to produce english webs and documents in addition to their local versions. i doubt it is all that hard for them to do so.

note that the documents being in chinese etc also points to a very strong possibility that these same boards are actually selling very well in china itself, hence chinese only documents

I was contemplating emailing VccGnd to see if they had considered putting the booloader onto the BluePill, but If the BP currently arrives blank, I doubt they would want to waste time and money installing the bootloader unless they thought they could sell a version with the bootloader for a higher price.

Though they may be more open to making a F4 version of the BP if they thought it would sell.

particularly if it’s just changing one component reel/tray on the pick and place
oh and the silk screen as well, maybe a couple or three tracks … …
stephen

I wonder if we could at least have them fix the USB pull-up resistor .

SukkoPera wrote:I wonder if we could at least have them fix the USB pull-up resistor .

BTW.

I’ve tried emailing Vcc-gnd about the Blue Pill, but I don’t hold out much hope that they will get back to me.

Baite dont seem to have updated their site either.

[RogerClark – Sat Jun 17, 2017 7:59 am] –

Baite dont seem to have updated their site either.

FYI, recently received the “BAITE” boards from G & C on eBay, and they look like the real thing; nice clean silkscreen, no messy soldering. No reason to assume they are some kind of weird “copy” of the original BAITE, or “factory seconds”.

These: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/351590646697

I’ll post a photo later.

at around us $4 priced on the market my guess is that for now it would still be viable for continued manufacturing, if these are after all made by smt machines they would literally be producing hundreds per run. even the packaging may be automated. very few people involved except in the last stage – distribution. given this is a mass product with relatively low margins, i doubt there would be many competitive clones. what would be more likely is that there are a lot of resellers who bulk ordered the baite maple minis (likely from the aliexpress manufacturer) and resell them on ebay and in actual shops etc