Pandora Update 20/06/09 - 2 Fresh Items of Pandora News

June 20th, 2009, 23:06 Posted By: wraggster

Today the openpandora blog posted 2 new items of news, here they are:

At least I'm not dead.

Things are always a learning curve the first time you try them. Apart from maybe suicide.

Anyway, the point is the last couple of weeks have had delays caused by a most unexpected event - US Taxes and UPS.

See the thing is we ship the parts to the USA, Dallas to be exact, they put them on a PCB and then all that comes back to the UK. But here is the weird part - UPS keeps wanting us to pay taxes on these parts - even though they are to be re-exported soon after. We have tried the recommended routes 'Temporary export' and 'Controlled goods' but still, randomly, a huge tax bill arrives. It's frustrating stuff which we are having to try to deal with yet UPS keep moving the goal posts.

Now, here is the community involvement part - does anyone out there know the real way to deal with this? The real rules? As UPS just keep changing the story every time.

So is there anyone out there who can shed some light on how we should be doing this to avoid those taxes? An expert on US customs and taxes maybe? You can answer over on the forum.

Aside from this we are very pleased and happy to have chosen to manufacture in the USA rather than China - I hear, alas, that's a pretty rare thing these days.

It has begun.

Well, sort of. We placed our order for the production run of the first 105 boards today!
Yes, it's really happening. Production of the boards does take about 4 weeks from now on, around July 24th (they need to be shipped to us), the first REAL boards will arrive. One of it could be yours, as those boards will be used in final units!

On the case side, things are still being worked on, but the to-do list is getting shorter and shorter.
It's really hard to say how long DaveC still needs to work on this, as he has very little time, but he is barely doing anything else except going to work and working on the case... thanks for that, Dave!
That's our short snippet for today, I'll keep you updated when more stuff happens.

http://www.openpandora.org/blog.php

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