Have you ever had that time when you're idly thinking and the thought "I should do something about that one thing before a problem arisises?". Well this morning I remember thinking 

You know, if those motors go OOS (out of stock) like what happened with SmartKnob, it's game over, right? Like... just saying... we should finalise this design fast or even just buy 20 motors now.

before replying to my other self

They've been on the market for like over a year at this point. I think we're fine.

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Well, I was scrolling though this lovely looking website of the Ratchet H1, which is the first commercial haptic knob I've seen, and was thinking "Ok, maybe I was a bit too hard on myself complaining that the £25-or-so Tetrinsics were too expensive, considering this is almost 6X the price."

Then I remembered that I hadn't updated the BOM spreadsheet since Concept3.2 over a month ago.

First item: LCD screens.

Me: Oh, that's no longer in here. Delete that row.

Second item: 580KV Motor.

Me: Oh yeah I better go check to see that the price is still the same.

First link: £1.95

Me: !

Second link: £2.54

Me: ! !

The message over the basket: Sorry, this item is no longer available!

Me:

[  !  ]

AliTools search: Nothing remotely like the motors

The music I'm now playing in the background: Thunderbirds Are Go - Chaos Crew Theme (a fast paced, orchestra boss music track)

Me: Starts scrolling my wishlist where I certainly saved the motor

The background music when I manually get to the bottom of the page, seeing nothing: Quiet and ominous [00:47s]

Vivaldi: 0 search results for "BLDC" or "580KV"

Bing: Shows 4 results, all of them wrong

Google: Links me to the £2.54 listing 

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Sigh. And just when I was feeling a bit excited with some "we are so back" energy. I was already kind of worried that these small motors were just old stock from something random. I've also read my fair share of products that have manufacturing or sourcing issues (like almost every hardware Kickstarter, Prusa, even Apple with the Vision Pro).

If the 580KV motors don't magically come back, or an alternative motor (I somehow missed every time I searched for it over the past 12 months) isn't discovered,

it is so...

over.