En zonder samenvatting: (warning long post)
Friends,
Ready for some good news?
We have been spending more than a week inspecting and testing the verification run units. The most important thing upfront: All small production adjustments we made are correctly incorporated and all work! Let’s go through everything piece by piece.
The Extender: (Rev 3) worked well like in all previous tests. Small optical changes has been successfully implemented. The optics work as expected and the extender is simply (by far) the best in the market. Even within not so ideal environments for IR (such as black AV racks with little reflection) you reach all devices with one extender. Status: Ready for release!
The Docking Station: (Rev 2) This is a relatively simple board and during the last verification runs we did not do any changes. The most sensitive part here are the 4 golden pogo pins that need to be perfectly picked, placed and soldered. The 40 units we received are all in immaculate condition. Status: Ready for release!
The Remote: (Rev 4) We have not done any important changes here. The only stuff we did were some special marks for high volume production and we connected some additional pins to the CPU for future use. This all worked well. The part we are not completely happy with is the signal strength of the antennae. We have a matching circuit and played with it but it did not really get us back to the perfect results we had earlier. We run some simulations and took the units to some aeronautics RF specialists friends lab as they have some of the craziest test gear around and ran a lot of tests and compared to previous units. The result is now clear. We need to use a different base material four our custom antenna and implement a slightly updated design. (For your info: The antenna we are using is custom designed as non of the of-the-shelf antennas could perform that well) We already implemented everything needed during the last days, sourced the different base material and initiated a test run for it. This will take a little while (about 3 weeks) but it’s really the very last thing that we electronically want to do. It would be wrong to have units out there and knowing their signal could be a few dB better by a small little change. We hope you agree with this. Apart from that we run all automated tests, stress tests and the units make an excellent impression!
The Brain: (Rev 4) Remember, last time we had the EU problem. This time all 40 units we received are perfect. We also did not perform any real changes apart from some marks for the high-volume production. All units came in perfect condition, with serial number and everything. This thing is ready for release!
The SOM (system on module): (Rev 3) This was the part we were worried the most about as we did some mass production clean-ups that are related to the time when we added a lot of debugging and redundancy due to the eMMC change. Until now all the units we made worked well but still included those unwanted and unnecessary pieces. Removing those for the first time was a little risk. This also provided us space to add an additional screw hole to fix the SOM permanently onto the Brain's PCB. Result: All very, very good and ready for release!
External power supplies: We had to change to a different, more expensive type (from another manufacturer). This was more for a certification reason as the previous ones also did a good job. For those who are interested in that topic I will write a more detailed post about in a couple of days. Status: Ready for release!
Michael wrote a stress test that did over 600 full firmware image updates on a couple of the new brains that he left running for the weekend. He went to the office today and as expected, it’s still nicely running. This is important as it says a lot about the product lifetime. The NAND units typically died between 200 and 300 cycles. I have a Rev 4 brain in front of me right now and love it because I know it’s exactly the way it has to be. Ready for primetime!
What’s excluded here are the polycarbonate parts where we still need to get and check the T-final parts. We expect no major risk there though. The results should be known in about two weeks.
Inspection of small mechanical parts: We went ahead inspecting every little screw, PSA adhesive patches and capacitive patches with the microscope and performed force tests. Nothing to complain there. And most important for the design guys among us - finally ALL the little screws are black: some of them are custom screws, made for NEEO. All fine here!
I hope you get a little of the exciting feeling we more and more get here at the office! The big moment is closer than ever. Rest assured we are not doing any amendments that could “break” anything of the now smoothly working NEEOs. The only thing we are still doing now is a 20-unit verification run of the remote to inspect the slight antenna change. Although the current version works good we really want to get this right to be performing at its absolute best in the tens of thousands of units that will be manufactured exactly like this.
The big dinosaurs in the industry can now get worried as the small team called NEEO is ready to kick some ass
Enjoy a great Sunday & stay tuned for news.
The NEEO team
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