But after those 500, There are still ~2500 Pandoras left to make. All are waiting on nubs, which are waiting on the nub company. Once that testing is finished, they can pump all 8000 out in a day (or so), and ship them to the board company. You say the board company can do the nubs themselves really fast ("as simply soldering the nubs on doesn't take much time"), so where's all this parallel working that's going on?
First, you don't know when the nubs will be finished. If the current prototype is fine, it might be they can send the first 1000 in 1,5 weeks. We don't know yet, we need to wait for any testing results.
Quoting myself from a dev-blog entry from August 26th:
While that happens, I will solder tons of LCD cables, while Craig and his helpers will prepare the cases and the lids for the big batch of boards.
I also know I explained somewhere the steps to produce a Pandora (back at the gp32x.de boards).
Basically, most of the work to assemble a Pandora is BEFORE putting a board in.
The complete lid needs to be assembled, with the LCD cables rolled, CE shielding done, speakers and WiFi antenna attached.
Then the lid will be assembled with the bottom case. DPad, Buttons, Lightpipes, Keymat, etc. will be put in.
These steps need about 12 minutes per unit - and the rest is about 5 minutes per unit.
As we have all the LCDs there already, the cases following probably next week, the rest of those 3000 lids can be prepared while boards are being produced.
That's what will happen in parallel.
Right, but the first new-nub boards only showed up a week or so earlier. That's 2500 boards since, say (built) Oct 10th, arrived (UK) Oct 17th. You can have those all built and shipped in two weeks?
If everything is prepared, we can do 200 units per day. We did that already. So, yes, it would work out.
But that's not even needed - the deadline for the board production has been set to Oct 18th by the company. If they keep their promise it means they will arrive in UK one week later.
And as said: We don't know when the nubs will be there. If we get them within the next weeks, we will get more boards in three weeks, not on October 10th.
I agree. And I do greatly appreciate your answers. I'm just trying to understand this timeline, but I think there are more delays and waiting that have to be in there than you're willing to admit.
Well, as said: This is just the estimation and plan of the board production company.
We still don't know exactly when the nubs will be finished nor if the company really can pull it off.
Someone asked for the BEST case above, and that's what I explained.
Basically, there are two unknown factors which makes a better estimation impossible:
* Can the board company really speed up?
* How long until the nubs are fine?
We will find out about the first factor within the next two weeks, I guess. If they pump out boards, we know it works.
About the second one: It depends how the testing works. It might be mass production can start next week but it also might take three weeks if more changes are needed. No one does know yet. But it's being worked on and we will let you know all news we get regarding this issue.
