Weekly Update: ordering the next batch of revised PCBs, continued work on uploaders and more load testing

Happy Friday! We hope everyone is having a great week. Don’t forget that you can always find our past updates here. This week as been a lot of continued work on important aspects of the entire system from hardware to backend. Here’s a look at what’s been going on:

Production

As we mentioned last week, we’ve been analyzing the PCB for electromagnetic emissions that coupled into our GPS system, reducing the sensitivity, and also an emission through the USB port that was over the limit for the FCC and CE certification.

We’ve discussed the PCB layout with layout experts from the company making the power supply chip we use, which is the most sensitive to the layout due to the power transients involved and got some suggestions on improvements. Also, we found a couple of errors in the PCB’s power and ground planes that we think are responsible for greatly amplifying any noise emissions into the very sensitive GPS system. We will implement these fixes and also include USB noise filtering components into the next 100 PCBs which will be ordered on Monday.

As soon as these 100 new PCBs come back from the factory, our factory in Taiwan will make a full assembly of these with all the latest plastic parts, test them through our set-up production tests and package into the latest packaging (which looks great by the way!). This will be a great milestone as if that works fine, we can start producing complete units at a much greater speed.

We are also working to find a production as well as a software setup problem in the CMOS camera modules we’re using which have produced a bad yield in our previous batch of units, and caused worse images indoors and especially in bad lighting conditions.

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It should be noted that in parallel to this we are continually tweaking dimensions of small details in the plastic and rubber parts, cables and packaging to make assembly more easy and improving the production yield.

Software and Backend

In order to get the OSX uploader shaped up, we have put a lot of focus on it this week. We’ve also been working on the login screens for the apps and the design and user experience to make searching for the photos you want quick and easy.

We have been continuing the load testing of the backend to ensure good performance when we continuously add users.

 

Have a great weekend!

/Memoto team