The only reason for this tiny update while we wait for everyone to get back to us is that the RGB LED was shining on only one half of the device due to the fact that it's mounted sideways to save space - but now this has been resolved by applying a piece of reflective material on the LED to "center" the light. The final receiver color will be black and only a small triangle in the center will appear to shine. Note that the LED is too bright to record properly, so the video is not an accurate representation of what it looks like.
The Canton fair will be held from April 15 to May 5th less than an hour away.
"Held each April and October, Canton Fair is China's largest trade fair with a complete product range of Chinese Commodities. It is divided into three phases, with the first phase focusing on Machinery, Electrical and Electronic products, the second phase focusing on Home and Decoration, while the third phase focusing on textiles, garments and fashion accessories."
They guarantee they can oversee import/export procedures, and we have copies of their import/export certification documents. The company name is different so we did some background checks. Their address and the owner's name are identical, so they should be legit.
Seems they are qualified to do this process for sure, the only thing is that the "old guy" (so they call him) who used to do this process is no longer with them - so they're trying to figure out what the process is. They haven't given us a price for the assembly work, either - the issue here more than bargaining on the price is to convince them to program the machines to do a small run... we absolutely need to start selling some units to get bootstrapped.
The main aggravation right now is that lots of stuff is on hold...
Two days ago everything was going wrong. Cable problems, processing problems, certification problems. Then yesterday everything miraculously got solved, by being on the phone with lots and lots of testing labs (especially in the EU), PCB houses, and sending 200 emails for the cables. Things were looking real good yesterday, and a little celebration was carried out in the evening!
Looks like we may be able to do something for the European market sooner rather than later, and get both CE marking and FCC compliance marking. These cost almost as much as the production tooling and frankly the perceived value on our side is preeeetty low... and... the cruelty of having to sacrifice two of our babies in the testing process with cruel ESD sparks, and high temperature ovens!! But we negotiated some great terms that may (may) allow us to launch synchronously in US/EU.
It even looks like these tests may not be a total formality after all. Aside from electromagnetic radiation testing which is totally pointless for our low speed circuit, and ESD testing which is marginally useful, they will bombard the receiver with all sorts of RF interference to see if it activates unduly (electromagnetic immunity) - that's quite cool. Say you're driving with the unit on near some factory on the highway or a radio station... it helps to know the unit won't start punishing you at random. This is a near theoretical impossibility anyway since the RF chip we're using has at least 4 ways of calculating CRC and avoiding bad signals even from identical receivers with different transmission keys - but it's the one test we're eager to see the results of. At least we're getting some value out of what is for the most part a total ripoff.
The day started out not so well with Sonia saying that even the second cable sample wasn't good enough (without testing it) and authorizing the cable maker to create tooling to make our sample for a hefty fee. Took half an hour to rectify the situation, another half to convince the rubber master Mr Tang to give it a shot, and the whole afternoon to email 190 (kid you not - 38 * 5 pages) manufacturers on the web. Finally after a day of emails, filling out captchas, cut and pasting the email, re-cut and pasting it when the vendors replied with their own cut and paste stuff and catalogues, phone calls and what not - we got two people to send samples. It ...
The technology in these samples is impressive. They have very low conductivity, almost metal-like. Silver nanoparticles are used. This material is utilized in airplanes and rockets. It's also very expensive. You can connect a battery on one side of the two strips and light an LED 25 cm away through the rubber. You could probably do that meters away if the sample strips were that long.
Now, though the material's great, there are many problems with these samples.
- The wire comes off easily (he didn't use conductive glue as promised)
