Hi,
For those who don't know:
Microchip.com offers the ability to sample their products. This allows for a limited supply of 16F6x8(A) chips. For a single RepRap it would be a nice way of reducing the price of the total system a bit. Since you're really prototyping electronics in order to develop a system that will be massively adopted I don't think we need to consider such small amounts of sampling as unethical... If the PIC based system becomes more popular this will also increase microchip.com's regular sales (through distributors).
You should count on some delivery delay (2 weeks at least). But you can order (as I did) at once:
3x 16F628
3x 16F628A
3x 16F648A
3x any other chip you'd like... (they have some quite heavily equiped PICs)
You may re-sample surprisingly frequently actually.
--
Erik
