Regarding getting distributors to supply programmed chips, you wrote:

>Ben Wirz and I have gone through some major headaches getting PIC16C505s and
>PIC16C57s programmed for the "TAB Electronics Build Your Own Robot Kit".
>Microchip will do it, if you have quantities over 10K and you can wait 10
>weeks (they will treat the parts as separate part number and you can repeat
>order without having to resend the object files).  The best vendor we've
>found is Future-Active (Digi-Key was surprisingly bad).  We've also worked
>through a ton of small, crappy ones.

My company was looking into having Digikey do this for us. The price looked
good: twentyfive cents each. We have not yet done anything other than
obtain the pricing for the service.  What was your experience with them
that you didn't like?

Tom M.

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