A schedule? For real? (2011 - 02 - 24)


EvilDragon

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Sorry for the lack of news during the last 10 days - I was simply running out of time.


Besides my normal life job, I was building, shipping and repairing Pandoras during the day while soldering LCD cables and replying to eMails during the night.


Oh, and worked on the OS, so that HotFix 5 will be final soon (RC2 is out already). I also skinned PanPlayer and mednafen-pcengine... so yeah, life was (and still is) pretty busy for me.


So, what happened in Pandora-Land?


Well, CircuitCo still managed to produce and send us more boards, which is good.


They still didn't manage to send us a schedule so we can only guess how many PCBs will be finished when. So far, shipments were a random number between 150 and 500 every 1 - 2 weeks, which is okay, but we rather would like to know exactly what is happening and when everything will be finished.


This is common practice in PCB assembly (we had no such problems with the iControlpads, they were all finished the day the company told us they will be), so I guess it's something we can expect from them as well (and kept requesting it since christmas...)


There seems to be hope though - CircuitCo has hired a new employee who introduced himself as being responsible for the Pandora production now - planning and quality assurance.


He wants to send us a proper schedule until the end of the week and ship boards weekly in regular numbers. That would be a dream - if that really is something he can do, we could finally give way more accurate numbers when you guys will get your Pandoras, not just guesstimations based on CircuitCo's production.


Time will tell though - but if CircuitCo continues to spit out boards like they did from January on, we'll continue shipping Pandoras, which is most important.


Thanks to a few Premium Units sold, Craig could hire a bigger team and catch up with Pandora Assembly. Also, he could get some staff to test broken boards to clearly label them and ship them back to CC to get them repaired. This really helped us a lot and sped some things up significantly!


We are expecting more boards this week (or did Craig already get them?), but there seemed to have been a production pause for one week. Let's hope that was the only week.


I'll keep you updated, as soon as I get more infos from the new employee. Hopefully, he can plan and organize things properly!
 
SECOND!


Working your ass off for us as usual. Again, don't die ED :D we need you!
 
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It seems weird to me that they would hire a new employee for this. I would have thought they would simply move over an existing employee to this task instead of hiring someone new who might be inexperienced. Do you happen to know why they chose to hire someone new?


Thanks for bringing us to the light at the end of the two months long tunnel. I'm looking forward to getting my Pandora!
 
well i'm glad for the good news :D i just upgraded my order so i hope they can keep the extra assemblers longer.
 
It seems weird to me that they would hire a new employee for this
My guess is that they diddn't hire him for the pandora, they just needed new people and one of the new guys (or if he was the only one, just he) got assigned to a smaller project to get acclimated
 
Tnx for the update, i am in the 3000+ que, hopefully mine will be done soon.


I made a nice little archve of software, thats waiting to be used on the Pandora!
 
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It seems weird to me that they would hire a new employee for this. I would have thought they would simply move over an existing employee to this task instead of hiring someone new who might be inexperienced. Do you happen to know why they chose to hire someone new?

I don't think they hired one especially for us, I guess he works with other projects as well, but I think the Pandora is one of their biggest projects.


AFAIK, they are normally specialized on small production runs, so the mass production we currently are doing with them is something new for them as well.


So far, we've mostly been speaking to the CEO and the guy who actually works on the production for the Pandora so far, there was no real guy managing that all.


That might've probably been the root of the issues we had:


The production manager could tell us how fast the board production runs and how many they can ship within the next days.


However, he only does production - so if there's a different customer, it might be that there will be a pause of one week in the Pandora production to put the different customer inbetween. That's just my guess, because I know there was one week where no board had been produced, and the other random numbers tell me something similar. Maybe sometimes they have a customer who needs some prototypes done, which pauses the production for 1 day.


Having someone managing and overseeing EVERYTHING here, the missing link between the sales and production team, might actually help.

.. my normal life job,..
:blink:


And what is it? (its no secret? ;) )
Some kind of TV production/Video editing thing, if I do not completely misremember things.

Yep, definately true.

Tnx for the update, i am in the 3000+ que, hopefully mine will be done soon.


I made a nice little archve of software, thats waiting to be used on the Pandora!

You can be sure we are doing everything we can to make the Pandora production as fast as possible.


It's no easy task, there's a lot of work and we can't simply wait for CC to produce boards, we need to remind them regularly they should produce boards... well, hopefully, that will change with the new guy :)


We'll see when we get a schedule :)
 
Great, thanks ED, after 2 years of largely forgetting about Pandora I dip back in to find a load of mouth-watering videos and the end being within grasping distance. I'm not surprised it's taken 3 years to get this far, Nintendo didn't develop the DS in 3 years I'll bet.


In fact, they released the DS in 2004, and have only made minor updates in all that time, with no major new releases in the DS line, so I'd guess they look at close to 7-year development-to-release schedules.
 
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- 1 Jura Kaffee Vollautomat
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essential equipment
 
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Well this is good news. We can do some guess work:


- 2300 are finished


- 150-500 are produced every second week.


Therefore for Batch 1:


1700 needed


- 22 weeks to 7 weeks needed if 150-500 every second week


- 11 weeks to 3 weeks needed if 150-500 every week


The fact they have a new manager on the case would suggest that the volume should not go down, so being an eternal optimist we should get all Batch 1 boards within 2 months.


If the new guy manages to increase output to 750 every 2 weeks we are down to about a month, that would be really great!


Anyway, production in continuing and the more they do, the more they refine the process and the faster they will produce.


Fantastic to be down to the "Weeks" left in the project. :)
 
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The whole story behind all that is really impressive. I'm not a 1st day-er but I've now been waiting for much more than a year, and I'm still waiting for my Pandora toy to come here as if I had ordered it yesterday !


CircuitCo becoming aware of Mass Prod procedures is a real benefit too, an excellent new for all successive productions from the Pandora Company Limited ;) Any plan on an OMAP4430 Pandora ? I'd be on it for a second Pandora :p


Right back on topic, these are excellent news ant should be extremely rewarding four you guys who have spent most of their free (and even non-free possibly) time on such an acheivement. I'm proud I (very modestly) contributed to that.


Now, I'm as impatient to getting my Pandora as ever !!!
 
I wonder if Pandora production will overtake the Gizmondo's 21,000 at some point. I hope so.
 
I wonder if Pandora production will overtake the Gizmondo's 21,000 at some point. I hope so.

It's great to know CC is taking countermeasures to ensure that production will not halt. So we should have a reliable schedule by the end of the week? I hope that having their word in writing will allow OP to formulate a contract. I know that CC does not want a contract for whatever reason, but that would at least grant OP compensation for downtime. I hope that ED's post satisfies the info-craver's appetites.


I would also like to know if OP received the rest of the cases from China.
 
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