A final newspost! Well, for this year - because there's no time to rest for us in January.
The move to the new forums was successful, I am personally really happy I can use my Pandora to browse them again! As far as I've seen most of you like them as well. So it was really worth moving!
Finally, I found some time to edit the Pyra Prototype production video! So, here it is - our day at Global Components, producing the first Pyra prototype boards:
And as it's the end of the year, here's a quick status summary:
I am personally happy how much we moved along. Some things took longer than I had hoped for (especially getting the rotator chip to work used up some time!), but we nearly managed to finish prototypes until the end of the year.
What's the status? Here you go: -------------------------------
* Keymat: 99% finished. It's done and working, only thing left to do is test the feeling in a full prototype. I don't expect anymore changes here though.
* Hardware PCBs: 95% finished. All PCBs have been produced and are now being tested by Nikolaus. He found one small issue on the CPU boards that has already been fixed (even on the existing prototype boards). If there are no more issues found during testing, they are 100% finished!
* Case: 90% finished. The design is finished, molds are being created (most of them are already done) so the only thing left is producing the first cases, testing and tweaking them. Not much left to do!
* Production Run Setup: 98% finished. With the prototype run, we found some smaller issues thanks to the analysis (i.e. some vias need to be changed as they can cause air blobs inside the solderings). Analysis will continue together with Nikolaus on January 4th. After all those tweaks, we are ready for the production run.
* Production Run Parts: A lot of parts that have a long leadtime have already been ordered and will be ready in April: The LCDs, the batteries (3000 are already lying at Global Components), the Nubs (over 10000 are lying at Global Components). So if all goes well and no issues arise, we could start the mass production in April / May. Don't take that for given though, that's a best-case date!
So we're really close with the hardware! The OS itself is already running nicely on the devboard, but it needs to be adapted to the Pyra hardware. Mostly drivers and some design files. This'll take a bit of time, but when the prototypes are in the hands of the devs, it should speed things up.
The currently planned timeframe for me to visit Greece for the case production is January 20th - January 28th. Until then, all our prototype PCBs will hopefully work fine!
So much for the current status. We've come a long way, and we're really close. Thanks for all your support, I hope you a really happy new and exciting year 2016!
Thanks again from the whole team!
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Michael Mrozek