Battery manufacturer factory visit

We weren't allowed to take pictures. The fact that it took them 3 hours to create a battery pack (battery, cable, connector) with the required properties to fit in our receiver enclosure underlines how miniaturized this thing has become. The cable must stick out from a certain point on the battery and at a certain angle or it won't fit.

If you have started following us recently, the miniaturization is one of the key features of this product. Would have been easy to stick a 9V battery in an off the shelf waterproof enclosure, and two of those cable glands that look like (and are as big as) a stormtrooper's helmet. But no - here we've eliminated the already tiny 24V pack, created custom miniature grommets, we have so little space that even the thickness of the battery wires (less than 1mm?) needs to be considered. We probably went too far with miniaturization, the DL2000 looks so much smaller than the CB-3000 when they are connected!

Anyway, they've learned how to create this pack now, and they will also fix up the remote control batteries. Final samples in 3 days.

One thing that's pending is to find a way to recharge these remote control li-po packs. USB recharging requires expensive certification even for a simple circuit (because it would connect to AC mains indirectly). So we're thinking, if we can get two jumbo sized 3.6V batteries and hook those up to a li-po recharging IC, and slap a connector on that, we'd have a pretty cool little board that we don't need to certify (as it uses batteries as a power source) with which you could recharge the remote's li-po pack. One set of AA sized li-ion batteries would be enough to recharge at least 30 times probably up to 50. Then you could buy two more of those AA cells the next time around - the advantage being that their size is a lot more common than the li-po pack and thus you'd be able to get them cheaply anywhere.

Worst case you just throw away the remote's li-po pack after a couple months or however long it lasts, and buy another one for a few dollars - we don't want to be in the battery sales business or have to stock these, but, this is not really the biggest fish to fry for now.

If all goes well we may have a surprise prototype fully working (and with it complete manufacturing instructions, required materials and BOM) by the end of next week. We should also have the new grommets. If grommets are ok and don't leak water, waterproofing is done, so it's time to move on to the plastic mold which is our largest tooling expense.

Oh, and enough components are being shipped from Canada to assemble 10 units, we'll need these components to do a preliminary test assembly run (with machines).

So many things happening that it's hard to keep track!! To-do lists everywhere. Things are moving fast now that we're here in the eye of the dragon. We should have professionally assembled boards and a fully waterproof prototype and a fully functional surprise part and perfect batteries soon. Also we may be getting samples of a new amazing way of using conductive rubber for electrodes but this has complexities so we're trying to figure it out before posting details.

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