Things are hectic - busy, busy, busy! At least 3 megaupdates should have been posted so far but we've been busy at factories and haven't had time.
For now, get this. We've convinced a state of the art PCB house - with ties to major Japanese companies - to accept a very small initial quantity to enable us to bootstrap!!
This required weeks of negotiations and begging, and was in retrospect only possible because Mr Wen and his workers are not from the Canton province. They understand standard Mandarin Chinese perfectly, so our communication with them was quite smooth.
Very busy working on a number of fronts, but stay tuned for an important progress announcement coming up within 24-48 hours.
Also today a CAD file will be sent for the final prototypes before making the plastic molds. Since they offer spray painting services, this is a good time to think seriously about the color and look of the device. Silver, sci-fi look? Or black? Mirror or matte finish? Possibilities abound.
This new Chinese soldering iron is not too big but it gets hotter and hotter until you can't touch it and the plastic starts to melt and you have to turn it off. This happens within 5 minutes. It's just a backup found at the local supermarket while we wait to retrieve our soldering equipment from Mr Tang's factory. However, something good came of it... it gets hot enough to make solder stick to our cable and ring terminal. Playing around with it, a very good system for cleanly soldering the ring terminal has been discovered. Here are the instructions we'll give the factory.
Test subject: empty DL2000 receiver enclosure, with NEW impossibly tight grommets by Mr Tang, new softer main cables, and the vibrating motor sticking out with its own cable.
Test 1: very high pressure jets of water from all directions, for 2 minutes
Test 2: submerged in a foot of water, cables pulled to the sides
