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2010-05-26 23:48:17 (7330 views) Jason's off to northern China until next week. He says he's taking classes on Confucianism! Are we supposed to believe that? As if they didn't have classes in this whole province of China :)
Confucius is pretty popular here... it's like saying one is away to New Mexico to buy some cigarettes :)
We think he's got a girlfriend!
Regardless, tomorrow we're on our own with Mr Tang and the welded motors. We only have 5 samples of the motor + metallic support assembly. If that fails we'll need to go through several steps again (order metal bits, re-laser weld metal bits, find new rubber supplier, retest).
So we HOPE that he'll get it right and not break the motors!!!
We need everyone all over the world to keep their fingers crossed starting 24 hours from now and for a duration of 8 hours or so. Call it a moment of support. A DreamLover spiritual retreat.
Just ...
2010-05-26 22:41:16 (6861 views) 0.5mm thicker is the price we pay to simplify manufacturing and ensure the piece is robust and resistant to pulling and bending within some acceptable limit.
Also, after an incredible adventure with range, testing labs and more, we've finally got a PCB layout which gets us maximum juice and does not break any regulations. This was a heroic effort - everyone contradicted everyone else. Some said chip antenna has to be 2mm from the ground plane, some 4mm some 6.9mm some as much as 8mm. Some said the antenna is inverted F, some said it's helical. In the end we took it apart and, well, it's microscopic in size but it looks helical... and we tested with a bazillion configurations, attached pretty much everything metallic around the house to the antenna pad including
- properly sized wires
- randomly sized wires
- thin and thick wires
- super thick wires
- wires curled up in a helical shape
- wires curled up in other odd shapes
- wires standing up straight, bent in all directions
- LEDs (and they give good range too, incredible!)
- wi-fi router antenna (5x bigger than the receiver :))
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2010-05-25 11:59:26 (6554 views) No interesting updates as we're totally swamped by regulatory duties, lab testing, have manufacturers, RF engineers, testing labs on the line; the complexity and burden imposed by governments on productive sectors of society is truly intolerable. Here we wish to recommend the book "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand.
When this product comes out assuming we make it in one piece it will be a true miracle. Going through these formidable compliance obstacles without a market of 100,000 to 1,000,000 potential users is an existential risk. No one in their sane mind is ever going to attempt this again...
The law is so complex even testing labs can't agree with each other. No way to summarize here, just know the regulatory burden is 50 times more difficult to sort out than any of the electronics...
More soon when we can report with positive news. Unfortunately things are getting so complex and changing so quickly that even a daily blog cannot possibly document what we're going through. We're caught in an industrial size washing machine of regulatory mumbo jumbo, exceptions to the exceptions, class I and II changes, radiated and conducted emissions, anechoic chambers, Telecommunications Certified Bodies, Notified Bodies, in other words any and all of the bodies that don't really turn anyone on :)
Every time you call a test lab you learn there's a new piece of legislation which contradicts or supersedes what you knew previously. All countries are different. Except the EU which is standardized, except France for one thing and other places for others. This is insane.
2010-05-24 00:03:46 (5909 views) Three receiver layouts and two remote control layouts will be produced (short run) and the best combination chosen and compared with all the manual antenna tweaking we've been doing so far. The weekend was spent studying antenna theory in preparation for this.
Also the motors have successfully been bonded to the metallic harness but battery welders did not do the job so we had to use a laser welder. Jason's still testing whether the motors still work after this process and if they do we'll try to overmold them. This time no glue will have to be added, so there will be no chemical interference with silicone curing, also the quantity of material inside the mold will be exactly the same each time.
2010-05-22 07:01:55 (6516 views) The new battery charging circuitry makes 3 lines available, in most cases these are used for LED indicators. We have
"L" in this table means "ON" and the LEDs or signal lines are otherwise OFF. Until last night we had three LEDs all hooked up to the charging IC, giving the remote a total of 6 LEDs. However because the placement of these LEDs is severely restricted due to the number of components already on board, they ended up being lined up in the middle of the remote with unpleasant aesthetic results.
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2010-05-21 04:19:16 (5860 views) New battery manufacturer has all sorts of certifications. Shorted the li-poly cells, and as he predicted, no fire or explosion resulted; the cell inflated slightly and became very hot, that's it.
The new PCB has been approved by the PCBA company for automated assembly; therefore we will submit the design for production.
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