The seasonal treats keep flowing, with an announcement from ED that Pandora has passed the final CE test. Warning: The following story may be distressing to former electroshock therapy patients and the Amish.
First of all, since this is what most of would want to know: The Pandora did pass the CE testing! Yeah!
Now, for those interested in some more details on the test… here you go.
You’ve probably accepted by now (graciously, no doubt) that there’s no point setting up camp under the mailbox before Christmas. Valuable information when you’re under four feet of snow. Sadly for team Pandora there is no such respite, with two notable milestones plonked right in the middle of the silly season. The second lot of revised cases (featuring tweaked LCD ribbon slots and shoulder buttons) is set to ship on the 23rd, while the final CE test has been booked in by ED for the 28th. Sorry OP Ltd, there’s work to be done. Step away from the eggnog. (Thanks to tipsters Bosbeetle and mali.)
Sources: [1] [2] [3] | Discuss here!
Evil H. Dragon has blogged up a big one. If you’ve been reading PandoraPress you’ll know a lot of this stuff already, but it’s always nice to get a meaty serve of words from Pandora HQ. Images and video have been snipped to conserve pixels; you can find the post in its original form at the source. Oh, want to know what the above pic is all about? Don’t let your raging inner nerd miss the links at the bottom.
There’s barely a morsel of news to chew today, and it may stay that way until Wednesday. But there are some recurring questions appearing on the forums, so this might be a good time to catch a few people up on the current situation.
If you’ve sent OpenPandora an email in the past week, you may still be waiting on a reply. Don’t worry, it’s not just you. They have received a flood of order enquiries following the recent mailout (and Engadget coverage). If you don’t get a reply right away, you’ve at least secured a spot in the email queue. Craig says:
There are way more *requests* for orders than there are Pandoras left, however quite a lot of the requests never become paid up orders.
Also people cancel orders for various reasons from time to time, so those become available too.
So it’s definitely worth emailing, and if you pay quickly then you are guaranteed a Pandora.
The demand is so big we are considering allowing some of the 150 reserved for webstores to be sold direct to customers, as they are not all sold yet.
Another lightning fast blog entry from EvilDragon. Judgement day draws near! Beware the four horsemen of the Pandocalypse.
Just a quick note:
Got an appointment.CE testing will take place next week on Wednesday and will probably take about 1 – 2 hours.
This will leave me some time to setup the unit to prepare the test. I’m also working together with DJWillis, notaz and cpasjuste at the moment to bring the patchworked OS together
Two official blog posts from EvilDragon in the space of an hour? Unheard of!
Well, just some nice things you guys would like to know.
1. ALL parts (including the nubs) have arrived at the factory! For ALL 4000 Pandoras!
2. Chinese holidays are almost over, so the case should also be finished soon.
3. The Rev4 prototype Pandora is currently on the way to me so I can do the CE testing (gonna call the company today, I’ll let you know when testing will take place)
4. Softwarewise, we’re pulling all the patches we have together. The OS needs some more tweaking during the next months, but all the basic stuff does work and the image is pretty stable. I’ll do more videos when I get the prototype model.
That’s it for now. Short but good news, eh?
59 tiny minutes later…
Just a quick update:
The holy gra… eeerm, the Pandora Rev4 Prototype just arrived here
Fab.
And now, a correction. As you should be aware by now, our Pandoras will be assembled in Texas, USA. This has lead to the misconception that Texas Instruments are assembling them. While TI have (obviously) been involved in the project, MWeston advises that it’s actually a different company in Texas doing the grunt work. Unfortunately, the bastion of copypasta you’re reading right now has had a hand in spreading the misconception. If you’ve been misled, confused or flat out told the wrong thing, please accept this sheepish apology.
Golden Week has descended, EvilDragon has spoken. Looks like we’ll be waiting until the other end of the Chinese break to see our moulds, which means another week or so. Hey, don’t act all surprised. The good news is, the team will be working to make up this lost time elsewhere.
Hi,
while the moulds are still in production, the 105 boards were pretty sturdy, we didn’t encounter a single problem yet which is really cool.
Our initial plan was to wait for the first final cases and then do the CE / FCC with a final unit. After that, we wanted to produce the rest of the 4000 boards (and cases, of course) and ship them.
However, as the cases need a bit longer, we decided to speed up the boards mass production. As soon as Michael gets the final nubs (which should arrive soon), he’s gonna ship a complete prototype Pandora to me (in Germany), and we’ll do a quick CE testing with that one. If that one passes the testings, the Pandora in the final case will also do so (as a plastic case doesn’t add radiation). This does mean that we can immediately start the mass production of the boards after that – which speeds up the whole thing by a few weeks. The only downside is that we have to do a second testing with a final unit to get all the FCC certifications and therefore have a bit more costs – but it’s definately worth it.
By way of preface, the term “bottleneck” should be taken as a bit of light-hearted melodrama, as it has on the forums in the past week. This stemmed from some questions about what will happen when the case moulds are done. Scenario: When the moulds are ready, 10,000 cases can (and will) be produced quickly. But at the moment, there are only about 100 boards to put in them. Boards take longer to make than cases… bottleneck! The obvious solution: Start making the boards sooner. The only obstacle: FCC/CE testing. Thankfully, this looks like one of those wide-necked bottles. Craig slams it down fast:
The boards are good so far, we are probably going to be starting mass production slightly earlier than mentioned in the last couple of weeks. Making those cases the bottleneck again
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