All 4000 boards have not been populated yet. It actually becomes an issue with storage to have so many boards sitting built all at once. They have to be kept somewhere which tends to be awkward because boards must sit in ESD safe trays on grounded carts (remember that picture of the 80/105?). Issues with humidity control are important because parts are no longer sitting in sealed bags, although they are already soldered so it is more of a general storage thing. Craig meant that absolutely everything is ready to go, absolutely every part is sitting at the facility, things are being tested carefully and slowly still, the build process is understood...umm I don't know what else to add so I don't read the next 10 pages about how the sky is falling.
There is merit in being vague, but I'll take the chance anyway.
Some continuing issues with alignment or fit in the test jig back in December held things up slightly. The Christmas holiday/New Year didn't help past the 24th either. The New Year has things running again and it's obvious now the PCBs are not the bottleneck. Damn plastics company. <grumble grumble>
Before any arm chair engineers pop in, please be aware that building the boards is a well understood process at this point and done very quickly. The pick and place machine can jam them out as quickly as you can keep the reels loaded. The boards are being built in batches according to how fast they can be tested. Currently that is going to stay at about 450-500 at a time. The process is to build 500, get them into testing and build the next 500 while the first ones are being tested. Once cases are available, the third parallel step will be to have a batch of 500 being assembled while a previous set is in testing and another new set is being populated.
All 4000+ antenna boards and LCD cables have been assembled and inspected. Building and testing will continue throughout January and be ready for the cases. As usual, I have to fear the backlash from misunderstanding my words and I have to read over what I type 10 times before posting it but keep in mind that most of you don't and aren't expected to truly understand this process. Things are progressing in the natural fashion a small run (by any big company's standards) like this should be done. When the cases show up, this parallel process will fall right into place and pump out shipments at a steady and predictable rate that has been expected from day one. We can't build and ship all 4000 in a day or even a week but it will be done as quickly as possible.
Some people talk about how we should spare no expense to get these done sooner and we agree. I might bring my wife to Texas to help with the labour in order to get more done sooner and I'll probably spend 12-15 hours a day on the floor building these bad boys (if they will let me) to get them to you all as fast as humanly possible. It's going to be an exhaustive and miserable process, but that's not for any paying customer to care about.
I have created a well documented assembly manual for the Pandora which contains several parallel processes that can be set up as stations. There are six sub stations and two main stations. The main stations (assembly of lid and assembly of base) require the most staff in order to crank them out faster. The sub stations require one person each (could be more if there are people) and are monotonous (ie. trim and solder speaker wires, apply copper tape, etc.). They could also be combined into more tasks and fewer stations. Hopefully this helps people understand that no news on the forum does not mean nothing is happening. It has never stopped being a lot of work behind the scenes.
