I thought that CC had populated the boards but because of all the waiting the boards had oxidised? I'm not sure if its standard practice to semi-populate a board and then wait months for the last part to be 'dropped in'.
Nope, they didn't populate them, that was the issue.
The nubs are manually being soldered onto the PCBs, oxidized contacts wouldn't be a big deal when manually soldering them.
The oxidized contacts are an issue when the PCBs are NOT yet populated, as machine population with oxidized contacts leads to these issues (there are many very small pins below all the SMD chips, you can't see whether they're soldered properly or not).
As machine population and manual soldering (the nubs) are two completely different steps in the production process, it's pretty common to do the machine population a while before.
GC has 500 populated PCBs lying around that are just waiting to be populated with nubs and volume wheels.
Usually, you let the machine do a full run (as simply loading the machine for a PCB like the Pandora takes 8 hours) and then you do the manual steps depending on demand and manpower.
Many manufacturers make SoCs in China. It sounds like you're generalizing the entire country's production based on some anecdotal information. For instance JXD devices use a wide variety of SoCs, are you sure the ones you were referring to had Rockchip
SoCs? And would an eventual console failure necessarily indicate an SoC failure (how many Pandoras have had to be sent back?)
Well, except for the later batches from CC (where the boards became flakey because they oxidized), I have yet to see a single Pandora PCB that had issues after a while of usage.
There were some that had issues from the very beginning which haven't been tested (i.e. charging issues), but the ones that worked never came back.
The only PCBs I got back was nubs and LCD Cables, no suddenly non-working PCBs.
(Well, as said, except for later CC batches with bad contacts).
I don't know about what JXD used where, but I've spoken to different companies here and their experience, and I also had some experiences with Chinese companies already... over 10% of the Dingoos failed within 2 months when I shipped them.
Quite a few assembly houses told me they had a WAY higher failure rate when getting SoCs from China, regardless which SoCs.
This doesn't necessarily have something to do with the production company - often there are clones or refurbished version sold "as new", and these cause issues.
So you don't know what exactly you will get.
Most companies turn you down when you want to order in small quantities - they tell you to get the parts from a distributor... and then you might eventually have quality issues.
As mentioned, GC once stocked SoCs from a chinese distributor - and they had an 80% failure rate.
Getting the same SoC from a German distributor changed that to a 3% failure rate.
So yeah, it probably more or less are the distributors, not the production companies... though these don't care as much about that than non-chinese companies do.
Usually you won't find out that the SoC is broken unless it's populated. So you either throw the PCB away or remove it and put another one on.
Most Chinese tablets and PMPs seem to have SoCs with minimal other hardware components around them, so they probably just throw away the PCB when it doesn't work.
Given their high output rate, throwing away that PCB will probably cost 10-15 USD.
With the Pandora, that would be a loss of 140 EUR per PCB, so not feasable.
That's a good motivation to do the more complex core logic (SoC, RAM, power) on a separate PCB that sockets into another PCB which can be lower layer/complexity. Then you can test/replace separately, and more easily upgrade that part of the design in isolation. It may also cost less.
True, though that won't help us with Pandora 1 now
Do you actually have numbers on volume for any Chinese tablet? Given the huge variety sold isn't it hard to believe that there are runs in the millions or even hundreds of thousands? You say it often but I really don't see evidence that going from Pandora volume to 10x that needs to increases costs by 10x, distributor component pricing never follows a curve anywhere this drastic..
Well, most distributors have a MOQ of 500 - 1000 if you want to order them for your shop.
Given the price and the number of people who are living in China, I bet they probably produce at least 100,000 of these.
Most of these tablets are aimed at the Chinese market.
