My update for today:
Well, to start I was alone for most of the day working on lids from a little past 11 until 15:30. My speed wasn't quite as fast as yesterday, but I think the quality was definetly much better. I'm learning that the Chinese are sabotaging some of my quality with some locking pegs near the LCD exit cable once the lid is being snapped together. Sometimes these pegs can be bigger than they are supposed to, which in turn create a small gap between the two pieces of plastic being pushed together. Its quite frustrating, but now after 3 days of working on them, this is another thing that I must keep an eye out for, and if it is too big, it can be cut off anyway with no harm to the assembly overall. Part of me wonders if some of these small pegs and so forth might be causing the cracks that occur around the lid for some people, and obviously, they create unevenness which was a complaint from early adopters. Hopefully the newer case design will modify some of these areas to support them better etc.
Let's just say this community, putting these things together is NO EASY TASK. From beginning to end, a worker should be able to assemble a Pandora from button, to keymat, to LCD lid, etc in about 15 minutes. The work we are doing now is to cut down this time once population of the PCBs starts happening next week. So basically we'll be able to drop in a fresh off the P&P PCB, finish assembly, and test the units.
The reason I mention this is not easy as today was my third day working on lids, and my hands were sore last night, sore this morning, and as the afternoon progressed, there was some strange sensations setting in from the amount of pressure I was using to snap the area around the wi-fi antenna in place, another area where a bulge can occur due to the unseating or miscutting of the wi-fi antenna.
Assembling the lid for me starts by securing the peg/hinge area where the LCD & wi-fi cable exit the lid, then immediately moving to the wi-fi antenna housing area. Should someone for the 2nd step not do this, the wi-fi antenna can easily joggle out of its area of housing and create a bulge or unevenness in that area, a lesson I learned late in the day on day 1 of lid work. This was quite frustrating as the lid is totally snapped together, and then it needs to be taken apart. EvilDragon pointed this out to me, but it took me many failures to ask him what I was doing wrong. Pretty frustrating, and hard on the hands. So today I learned about this bastard of a little peg that can be too big, which is also valuable to know.
Since my hands hurt, ED said its a good idea to mix things up a bit because you get tired and complacent with doing the same thing over and over again, so we started assembling lids into the keyboard/PCB housing. Again, NOT AN EASY TASK. the wi-fi antenna slides through like a snake, but the LCD cable is a challenge as it shouldn't be pushed together unless the cable is all the way through the slot and moving freely. If this doesn't happen, the cable can be trashed due to being stuck opposite of the hinge between the lid assembly and keymat housing. There's a learning curve here that needs to be overcome, and over time, confidence improves, and efficiency. I think by the days end, we had 64 ready for buttons, light pipes, and keymats/D-Pads tomorrow. Linux-SWAT has pics of course as he arrived just in time.
Tomorrow I'm going to attempt to video tape these two processes with my GoPro, perhaps with the chestmount, or maybe the suction cup will be OK too. I'll make two separate videos on this. Give me the weekend to do some editing.
Another highlight of today was I broke down and bought a plane ticket to stay an extra week to see the ReBirth late next week. Boards shipped yesterday from China, and Global Components is doing some work ahead of time on some boards sent in advance for calibration and populating the one side of the board. Sorry ED if I'm giving your good news here. So I get to stay an extra 8 days to witness the rebirth fo-reals.
That's all I've got for today. Thanks for the support from everyone viewing these updates.
