#Arduboy #Live Production review before pilot run goes live tomorrow!
In case you have not learned about Arduboy yet, it is a game sys
tem the size of a credit card built on Arduino. You can choose your favorite classic 8-bit game to play and learn how to program to make your own game.
As many of you might know, our Propogate Service have helped many Kickstarter hardware project to develier their first batch products for backers. Arduboy is one of them. Kevin created this project and made the video which went viral on youtube in 2014, incubated in HAX right in the heart of HuaQiangBei electronics market in Shenzhen followed with a Kickstater campaign funded over $40k in mid 2015.
At the moment, we are preparing for the pilot run (T1)of 200pcs and the production process will go LIVE on Twitter at 8:30 am on 13th CTZ / 4:30 pm on 12th PST . (hashtag #Arduboy #Live) . We will go through Surface Mount Technology(SMT) process for PCB Assembly.
Before that, let’s take a look of the journey Arduboy has been through with Seeed for Propogate service reposted from his Kickstarter Campaign. Let’s catch up tomorrow.
02/09 The Dev Kits are Coming!
Seeed Studio sent us this picture of all of the developer kits waiting to ship! We will be getting you tracking information shortly! 🙂
– Changes in circuit boards
– Battery management chipset (Longer battery life!)
– Custom metal snap dome button matrix (Better feel & Longer life!)
– Larger piezo speaker element (Better sound!)
– Full-Color RGB LED!!! (All of the blinkies!!!)
27/10 Factory Visit!
Kevin announced that Seeed Studio will be producing the kickstarter units!
The engineers at Seeed gave some feedback on some final adjustments to make to the mold and PCB that will help in production. This is the last meeting we have before starting full scale production. The samples weren’t quite ready but we should have them this week to show off. Due to the market shortage of OLED display right now combined with the delay in getting the molds started we are now looking at 60-90 days production time from today.
07/11 Arduboy in Shenzhen!
We’ve completed all the DFM and all of the files are submitted. We are just waiting for the molds to finish and the PCB’s to be produced to begin production. Because we have some time before all of the OLEDs arrive, we are going to use this time to push the product through FCC and CE certifications. The plan is also to upgrade the packaging to something we hope you will keep instead of relegating to the round filing bin.
30/11 Production Samples! – Fresh from Seeed Studio
On the 4th trip to China this year we visited Seeed Studio again and were able to take home some samples back to the office, so here they are! You can see in this video the updates we made to the design during kickstarter. We have the gold plated metal snap domes and RGB led on display!
Production is schedule to start next month and we are scrambling to get the packaging designed and our final logistics figured out. We have been learning a lot by selling our developer kits through the store and hope to use this to make sure everyone gets their Arduboy as quickly as possible!
22/12 The plastic mold is ready!
Things are coming together very quickly! Any day now we will be starting production of the first 200 units for developers. This will be a test to make sure all the components have been correctly ordered and there are no problems during assembly.
Here is a video of our tour of the injection mold factory. This is particularly exciting because they had just finished the molds and were doing what is known as a “first shot” or “T0” which is the first time plastic is injected into the mold. Typically it is very difficult to get a factory to cooperate to allow a visit during this time for a few reasons. First because they will do these test shots between shifts to minimize downtime. And second is that they don’t like customers to see the results because the first units always have minor defects that expose flaws in the mold.
Injection molds always require at least one tooling operation after they are produced, and depending on the qualities and configuration of the design, they have to be re-machined a few times. Our part is very simple so with only some minor details we should be getting some beautiful results!
We have already taken delivery on almost all our major components. We are just waiting on the remainder of the OLED displays to show up to be able to have everything to complete the Kickstarter!
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