Dabao Evaluation Board for Baochip-1x - Why Were the Dabaos Late? | Crowd Supply

Dabao Evaluation Board for Baochip-1x

A powerful new RISC-V microcontroller with mostly open RTL

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Aug 02, 2026

Project update<br>7 of 7

Why Were the Dabaos Late?

by

Andrew 'bunnie' H

Dear backers,

The shipping process took a frustratingly long time. This update is a revised version of an update I wrote on July 27 - Crowd Supply’s update review and publishing process is not automatic. As of the final revision of this post, most Dabaos have shipped to backers. If you are among the roughly twenty backers who haven’t yet received a shipping confirmation email with a tracking number, please log into your account and check in with Crowd Supply - they probably need more information from you.

Crowd Supply took several weeks longer than expected to ship Baochip. In post-mortem, according to Crowd Supply, the Mouser warehouse is "unusually backed up due to a rush of deliveries of inventory ordered months ago". That’s small consolation to all the backers who waited patiently all this time, or to me and the rest of my supply chain who rushed to get Dabao manufactured to meet a tight deadline.

I am all about transparency and being straightforward with my supply chain. Throughout the process of building the Dabao, I have worked with vendors to improve their lead times so we could hit our projected ship date of late June. I flew to Hsinchu and Shenzhen, and baby sat test infrastructure and assembly machines; I negotiated with vendors complaining about AI-related parts shortages and helped them find solutions to improve delivery dates, because they were transparent and responsive when problems arose.

Crowd Supply’s fulfillment was the exception. Crowd Supply is now part of Mouser, a billion dollar distribution machine which routinely handles products in tape and reel. The Mouser acquisition of Crowd Supply was supposed to bring them staff, make them more responsive, and improve their sales reach; instead, I’ve encountered the opposite. There’s more process than ever: purchase orders take weeks, fees are higher, service quality has declined, and shipping times are slower. Crowd Supply also takes the largest cut of any vendor in the supply chain – 46% of the cash raised went to them.

It sickens me a little to think of how hard I hustled the SMT factory to get the boards built, and the guys who worked overtime to hit our deadline. They did it gladly, and with great alacrity for just a couple hundred bucks. Then I look at the majority cut that Crowd Supply/Mouser commands and their opaque delay on fulfillment. It’s not fair to the workers, it’s not fair to me, and most importantly, it’s not fair to the backers.

Talking to other Crowd Supply creators, my problems are not unique to me. Crowd Supply has not been able to service the needs of the maker community adequately. I don’t have a great solution for this, unfortunately, because I had let my retail muscles atrophy over the past few years.

However, I do find it interesting that I’m able to basically order anything on AliExpress and get it delivered from all sorts of small, no-name companies - makes me wonder, can I be one of those small, no-name companies too? Almost every good adventure I’ve had in supply chains starts with an observation like this, so maybe it’s time for a new adventure. Sure, the shipping isn’t next day, but it’s definitely faster than what we’ve experienced in this fulfillment cycle, and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper, especially for customers in the EU. Tracking numbers and "next day shipping" are buttercream icing on a sawdust cake anyways if there’s a warehouse in the middle that sits on the goods for weeks and gives you no transparency or delivery updates on your goods.

So, maybe it’s time for me to return to the supply chain gym and start working out the retail distribution muscle, because late shipments look bad on Baochip, no matter the reason. In the end, I am responsible for picking Crowd Supply as a vendor, and thus I am responsible for the delays.

To be clear, I will continue to stock and make Dabaos available through Crowd Supply so long as they are willing to do business with me, but I also anticipate that in general, the status will be not immediately available and replenishment will be slow because the out-of-stock to shipment cycle time is empirically on the order of 2 months.

Happy hacking!

-b.

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