Well, you guys asked for numbers, so here are some.
First, I need to apologize - the status I have here from CC is actually a week old... I found it while working through my mails. Sorry about that.
Still, it's the most accurate information so far I guess.
Well, here is the quick overview from one week ago:
Boards shipped to us so far: 2403
Boards currently being tested: 177
Boards left to build: 550
Boards currently being debugged (more info below): 447
Boards currently being touched up: 293
Boards shipped back by us for repairs: about 380
While that's all nice, I guess you also want some more in-depth information if possible, right?
Well "boards shipped" should be clear to everyone, but what's the rest?
"Being tested" means they have been produced already and are currently being tested if they work properly.
"Boards left to build" is the number of boards that haven't been started yet (though, as said, that was a week ago).
They got a new, better oven for the production and have been doing production test runs with that one. The oven was the bottleneck in the production, as they can only put a certain amount of boards into the oven at the same time. If that new oven works well, that bottleneck should be gone as well.
Now to the boards that are being debugged and touched up. That seems like an awful lot! What happened?
While it seems like an awful lot, it isn't at all. A failure rate of 10% for such a complicated board with such a small run is quite normal, and 10% would be 400 boards.
It's a bit more currently, but that has a reason: The bare PCBs have been lying around for a year now - and therefore, the solder didn't properly stick to the boards anymore.
This is normally not that big deal, a quick cleaning of the boards fixes that... however, they didn't realize it needs to be done before more and more boards had issues - and they all need to be reworked, which takes a bit of time.
Let's get deeper into the debugging:
"Touched up" means they already know what's wrong and just need to fix it, which is great. They will go to the testing once they are fixed.
Many boards that are being debugged have similar issues, which is also great, as it makes finding the problem and fixing it way easier.
Here are more in-depth infos for you guys:
Boards with LCD issues: 73 (CC already knows what's causing this, so these will go into touch-up state soon).
Boards with SD Card Slot 2 issues: 22
Boards with various issues (audio, nubs, etc.) but booting fine: 76
Boards that need to be reworked (as mentioned above): 150
Boards that don't boot: 126
As mentioned above, they got some more boards from us (about 380) which need to be repaired, however, most of them just have broken nubs, which is a quick fix.
And don't forget that these numbers are one week old, so touching up, testing and also the test run with the new oven should already be finished, it might even be that they shipped more boards to Craig already.
I've still got 30 finished Pandoras ready to be shipped out and Craig shipped about 40 more to me.
So while the speed is not as fast as it should, I'm actually happy how CC is currently evolving.
They are working on finding production issues to prevent them for the future and are telling us what's wrong with the boards.
They also got a new oven to eliminate the last bottleneck and are trying to optimize the whole production run.
That's A LOT better than before.
The Pandora is a VERY complex board to build, most companies we asked couldn't even do it.... and if they could, they'd do it for a MUCH higher price.
Well, I hope those numbers help you a bit to understand what's going on.
If you have any further questions I can give answers to, I'll happily do that.
