Release New Blog entry - Soft top, hard shoulder.

[Kyosys]

Right, this photo might excite you:

We also hope to have all the banking problems sorted out this week. Very frustrating situation. Hope the 256MB of RAM and 512MB of NAND makes up for it!

We are looking for a few more people to get prerelease Pandora consoles who want to work on applications or the kernel. You should be able and willing to devote a lot of time to it, do not apply if you don't have the time to work on it before Christmas.

Awesome.

 

[bakawhite]

Agreed. off to change underwear...

 

[carlos]

nice, some good news.

 

[raj_takhar]

I agree its very good to see the fully populated PCB's :lol:

Whats really bad is that they are all stacked up on top of each other, and on a wooden surface

As I worked in contract electronics before IT, what I can say is that is a very bad thing.

You can pass alot of electromagnetic static discharge onto the PCBs quite easily, rendering them semi-useful, blowing surface mounted components quite eaisily.

I just hope they arrive from wherever they are getting populated in the correctly protetcted bags and are handled in alot more sensible manner (earth the table to prevent discharge) - no holding a piece of wood is not the same, a wooden polished surface is a magnet for dicscharge

Before anyone jumps in, I know what I'm on about here (chip)

 

[Mqark]

I agree its very good to see the fully populated PCB's :lol:

Whats really bad is that they are all stacked up on top of each other, and on a wooden surface

As I worked in contract electronics before IT, what I can say is that is a very bad thing.

You can pass alot of electromagnetic static discharge onto the PCBs quite easily, rendering them semi-useful, blowing surface mounted components quite eaisily.

I just hope they arrive from wherever they are getting populated in the correctly protetcted bags and are handled in alot more sensible manner (earth the table to prevent discharge) - no holding a piece of wood is not the same, a wooden polished surface is a magnet for dicscharge

Before anyone jumps in, I know what I'm on about here (chip)

I fully agree. It's fine to play Russian Roulette with your own eletronics I've done this for years at home - of course, like most people that have that background, it's easy to be complacent and say you've been handling electronics for years with no negative consequence - but there is always a consequence - every time you discharge static electricity (and wood and paper are great generators of static) you are either shortening the lifespan of components or just straight out killing them - luck is the only thing that dictates if the worst has happened. It's when electronics "mysteriously" die that people just write them off as a bad batch of components. This sort of unprofessional handling is not on and I really hope that my Pandora isn't in this batch.
If anyone needs an analogy, its like someone getting struck by lightening. Some people survive, some die. It's just plain better not to get struck by lightening in the first place.

I've worked as an electronic engineer and I'd have been sacked for treating PCB's this way. Anyone that tries to argue that this is a perfectly acceptable way to handle PCB's is just plain ignorant.

I'd have assumed that the Pandora's were being assembled in a professional plant - not on someone's kitchen table. Silly me.

 

[Tor]

+1 to the above, from another electronics engineer.

 

[Asmo]

I'm a bit torn.

On the one hand, any snippets of news indicating progress - YAY!.

On the other hand, on the ESD risk, this pic is a bit like enquiring with Ferrari about that car you've been waiting for, only for them to mail you back "Don't worry, it's undergoing it's final checks before delivery to you" accompanied by picture of it doing doughnuts on a rubbish tip piloted by two Chavs with a keg of cider.

 

[gruso]

^ That's a superb mental image, I laughed out loud. :lol:

Don't stress on it guys, these are probably just the first Mk2 boards going out to the devs who only have Mk0 & Mk1 boards. If they go bad it's their problem (to be blunt). I'm pretty sure they won't be assembling the bulk of the 3000 on a kitchen table.

 

[Asmo]

I have my fingers crossed that Craig doesn't have a fondness for polyester.

 

[Kyosys]

^ That's a superb mental image, I laughed out loud. :lol:

Don't stress on it guys, these are probably just the first Mk2 boards going out to the devs who only have Mk0 & Mk1 boards. If they go bad it's their problem (to be blunt). I'm pretty sure they won't be assembling the bulk of the 3000 on a kitchen table.

Yeah, but still.

It's not only about these pandoras in particular, it's also about trust. Trust that our pandoras are being taken good care of.

 

[Kisama]

I'm certain there is some kind of warranty offered. If not, the guys have been really good PR wise, and I can't see them leaving you hanging if your Pandora goes tits up within the first 6 months.

 

[raj_takhar]

The following post has just been placed by M Weston on the GP32x forum

Okay, here's a little update just from the assembly side of things. Some people are going to bitch and moan and raise hell for anything I say other than "shipping today!", but I will share some insight into the development process of a new project. This is basically as Squidge explained it before.

The factory will not do all 4000 at once, even if they had absolutely every part in front of them. This is a brand new design using technology that still isn't adopted by all assemblers. That is the POP design. Also, the 0.4mm pitched parts tends to cause troubles and requires very specific and repeated procedures to be followed to guarantee success. Basically, we have to do this in small runs. I tested a few boards of the new design, then batches get larger like 20 boards then 100, then 400 and then maybe the balance but the procedure has to be nailed down before they will pump out thousands.

Unfortunately, right now I am seeing a failure rate of at least 25%. That doesn't really scare me as it doesn't mean the boards are junked. It just means the stencil thickness, reflow oven temperature profile and dwell times and maybe even the visual inspection stages have not been tweaked yet. Reflowing the boards and doing some touch ups brings them back to life and then they work fine. They just have to keep trying things slowly and figure out all the tough areas so that those get extra attention and the areas of the boards that never fail can get a quick inspection. A final burn in test of each board will confirm that everything works.

We need to get the failure rate down to about 3% to get production going full speed. The manual labor on patching or re-running 3000 boards is financial suicide so you can see why things are not going as we would have liked. The biggest mistake any manufacturer can do is ship boards without feeling 100% confident in the hardware. It's common practice to use customers to test your beta software *cough* *Archos* *cough* but never to test hardware.

The other good news is that once this process is nailed down, we shouldn't see such headaches and delays for future batches. Everything is new right now and even though I have the most experience with this stuff in the group, I have never worked with such tiny, tiny little parts before. Going from 0.5mm to 0.4mm pitch BGA parts is a bigger leap than the numbers would suggest. Any fellow Engineers on the board might know what I'm talking about. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

 

[Tor]

Thanks for posting, I missed it from gp32x because there are just too many whine-about-status/refund threads and I've started to skip them. I assume this one was in there somewhere.