Gooooooood moorniiiiiing internet! And welcome to the latest DL2000 update! As you probably know, if you're among the thousands now following the latest trends in Male Management technology on these pages, yesterday was the Big Day for the DreamLover team at the EMC testing lab! You've got the video - but now you want the full report in all its gory detail? Read on...
Due to the distance we actually left home yesterday afternoon, and took bus #666 all the way to Evil Inc. headquarters... now this bus... this bus... hold on, trying to find the words. You see, China public transport isn't exactly the Gold Coast bus system... regular buses, the ones we always take to go to our plastic factory, are already very yucky, with broken seats, a powerful mold smell and miscellaneous stains everywhere. But this bus... the smell in it was quite unbearable and apparently both the A/C and the TV were broken so that it was freezing cold and the volume was too loud for comfort, especially since the entertainment consisted in blatantly staged government propaganda with foreigners explaining how they named their children after Chinese cities because they love China so much (you're all considering it, admit it). Now the ticket said "First Class" so ... this was the best ride in town! The worst part is that the driver never got on the highway so a 2 hour trip became a 4 hour one; and the erratic driving style was enough to make a seasoned acrobatic pilot throw up his breakfast.
We eventually got there and had no choice but to stop at a local Chinese fast food restaurant near the hotel. The first dish was discarded immediately as it consisted in super spicy red and green peppers and nothing else, with rice (they mentioned it would be spicy, didn't think it would have peppers as the main and only ingredient). The second dish was slowly ingested for lack of better alternatives. We arrived at the hotel exhausted from the bus trip and sort of messed up due to the meal. For all those new age vegan Chinese food lovers shopping for whole grain stuff at costco out there - the mainland is NOT a kung pao chicken take out in Amsterdam... this is the real deal - as rough as it gets! Home food is ok. Eating out is... traumatic.
Decided to go get a coffee to avoid going to sleep at 7pm and messing up the sleep cycle (and being half dead the next day at 8am). First coffee was a collaborative effort; Chinese coffee is no starbucks, so instructions were given as to how much sugar to put, how much milk and so forth. Despite over 10 minutes of instructions and remakes the ingredients were such that the results had to be discarded immediately. Powders are used for everything here, and we can think of safer things to ingest than bad tasting milk powder. Second trial at KFC, here the irish coffee had about 90% sugar so it was discarded. Eventually we decided to not have this coffee after all. Actually they have Starbucks in China, but not in this neighborhood - the testing lab is in the middle of nowhere in the poorest part of the region (probably to make it affordable to rent the huge complex).
Later that night there was a huge breakthrough with DL2000 functionality that you will know about soon, so the evening went quite well though this required some programming until 2am and as feared the next morning was like waking up from a head on collision with a freight train.
Determined to be there on time, we got up, packed our units and eventually made it to the lab (too early, so everyone was in a meeting and we had to wait for half an hour).
The following 8 hours were the hardest ever in this project, worse than the silicone factory visits!
Our contact at this testing lab is the worst contact we have. He's been wanting to play games with the price for a while now. He tries it every single time.
Today we played on their turf. As soon as we sat down at the machines, their engineer asked "so which test is this, for the US or EU". We said, of course both, that's what we've been negotiating since the very beginning. Guy says, oh no, one test US, one report us. One test EU one report EU.
Essentially they wanted double the money to do the same test twice! Fortunately a higher level manager was passing by and he turned out to be the only one to speak and understand mandarin well - we immediately befriended him and he told us we could have two reports with no additional charge - the test was going to be the same provided we tested below both FCC and CE limits (which was the plan all along). So right away our trip there proved to be very beneficial as we jumped right over our bad contact and established a personal link with the management.
Next, Mr DreamLover got locked in the airtight chamber for over an hour as the engineer measured the vibrating motor's emissions. After a while, he began to suspect the technician may have forgotten the remote had not been set to transmit (in order to isolate the motor). Seemingly he was conducting the whole test on the motor alone. No mic was installed in the room so after trying in vain to signal to the camera to open the heavy 7 inch steel door he spent the whole time sitting on the floor watching the antenna go up and down endlessly. Finally the door opened and the engineer said the motor was OK (no longer a need for the silly ferrite ring). The test continued, this time with the remote in transmit mode and so forth. In the end the first test phase (radiated emissions) was completed. They had to scan emissions with the antenna oriented horizontally, vertically, at every height 0 to a few meters, and across all frequencies - very boring process unless you're nervous as we were that there might be some problems... tools in hand to fix any leaking pipe on the fly... but there was no such need at this point.
Next the DL2000 was put into another airtight room and bombarded with interference at all frequencies. It continued to receive data with no problem whatsoever which felt a bit silly. At some point (2.4GHz) the thing is supposed to stop receiving because of interference right? Well we don't want to know - as long as they stamp the papers and let us sell this thing! So far so good.
Lunch time, big employee cafeteria inside the huge test lab complex, here the food was a lot better. We had to sort of manipulate our way into sitting at the same table with the CEO and the manager who had helped us earlier. Our main contact forgets conversations, keeps complaining about our requests very openly and without no shame, tries anything and everything to change the price after we've already signed their quote... he's the worst... We talked and made friends with the CEO, and next time they will send a car to pick us up at the train station so we won't have to repeat the odd bus ride :)
The next phase was a lot more stressful. Electrostatic discharges were killing the receiver but only when going through the cable, not when applied directly on the PCB. Very odd. Eventually it seemed the top half of the enclosure (made of plastic!) made it not work. Impossible. The brass inserts? Eventually the problem was tracked down to the top half of the enclosure pushing down the pulse capacitor close enough to the pcb for the electrostatic discharge to jump through the air gap into the RF circuitry.
Fortunately every time the receiver could be restarted and went on functioning normally after the battery was unplugged - so that's the absolute worst that can happen to you if you're at the north pole and like running on carpets with glass shoes and then touching the electrode attachment rings.
This problem would have caused us grief but in the end just a minor repositioning of the cap's leads fixed the problem. After this more strange stuff happened, apparently the unit was immune to 8kV discharges in all cases, except when one particular technician was holding the ESD gun. Mr Huang, ladies and gentlemen ("El Dentista" in the video) really has bad luck! We tried, no problem, another guy tried, no problem. He tried, ZAP. Unit had to be restarted. This went on amidst laughter by the whole staff, for over half an hour. Our receiver was hit with over five times the number of ESD jolts required by the regulatory bodies. Overall it must have been zapped 100 times or more. In the end we managed to fix the unit so that even Mr Huang couldn't mess it up, and all was due to the capacitor being oriented horizontally above the pcb and the actual distance between it and the pcb allowing 8kV to jump through and hit the RF chip... weird stuff.
In the end we passed, but we're not finished yet. The next and last test is LVD (Low Voltage Directive). This is something fat European bureaucrats thought up to ensure you don't get electrocuted by your washing machine - but for some unknown reason if your device uses RF, you have to follow this directive which is intended for high voltage devices. So most of the items in there are not applicable, and the test only involves shorting and overheating, but that doesn't stop our guy from trying to extract full pricing - and plus, they were now saying that even the LEDs required a separate test for yet another grand. Kidding? No they weren't. Apparentely there's some silly regulation for high intensity LEDs used for lighting, and we have to prove ours is not one of those 1W LEDs. So now we have to go to the manufacturer, and see if they tested the spectrum based on this regulation's criteria or not, and if not change LED manufacturers... this way we won't have to add another test!
Plus we need to prepare a bunch of information for the LVD test engineer to decide exactly which subtests are applicable... total headache, but we're ALMOST there! The unit can ALREADY sell in the United States. Very soon we'll be done with LVD which is an EU thing.
Interesting documentary on bringing this device to market throughout this blog. Thanks for allowing us to see what it takes to bring electrical products to consumers.
By Lance_Lake at 2010-09-09 12:21:20 Reply 
