We’ve entered the last phase of FloJack product development and production. Orders have gone out to suppliers and our manufacturing partners are gearing up to build an initial 1,000 unit order. We settled on a blended production strategy with some components built overseas, some in the US, and final assembly done by the Flomies themselves. We think this will be efficient, cost effective, and most importantly ensure the highest level of product quality. Keep reading for a full production update:

FloJack Mechanical

Case manufacturing is in full swing since it’s the long poll in our production run. The final case design has three parts (up from two) and a number of small clips and standoffs that increase the complexity of our injection molding process. We’re constructing a light steel mold with ‘side actions‘ (aka ‘side pulls’ or ‘cams’) that aid in the creation of these small, fragile pieces. This tooling process represents the bulk of the mechanical production time. After it’s completed, punching out 1,000 cases will take just a few days.

Clips and standoffs ensure a snug fit.

FloJack Hardware

We’ve also begun placing hardware orders. We’re working closely with our board house in Malaysia to have the FloJack PCB’s manufactured and populated. Then they’ll be shipped to Flomio HQ here in Miami for final assembly and quality control. This blended approach will ensure quality is high while keeping costs under control.

The last hand assembled prototype

We’re also building a custom FloJack programming cable. We swapped the large, ugly JTAG pinout for a tiny board-to-board connector – the black component at the top right of the board. This freed up valuable board space and made the unit more aesthetically pleasing.

Limited edition FloJack programming cable

NFC Actions for iOS

We’re wrapping up the second development sprint on the NFC Actions app. We’re able to read, write, and inspect tags. Can’t tell you how cool it is to write a tag with an Android phone and execute it on an iPad+FloJack. Patents aside, who says Apple and Google can’t be friends?

We have one last polish sprint to complete before submitting for app store review – but we’re well on our way.

FloJack SDK

The SDK has received some love as well. We’ve made it easy to play confirmation ‘tag scanned’ tones through the device speaker and increased read performance substantially over previous versions. We also committed a draft CocoaPod spec to help dev’s get up and running quickly. You can see all the goodness for yourself here.

Ship Date: May 26, 2013

Populated FloJack PCB’s will arrive the week of May 20th. We’ll immediately start programming them and running through quality control testing. We expect the cases to arrive the following week at which point we’ll begin final assembly, perform one last test, and hand your FloJack over to the postman.

We’ll keep you posted on any production updates. As you can probably tell we’re coordinating a lot of moving pieces. However there’s a possibility this timeline will accelerate a bit – no promises though!

In the coming weeks we’ll be collecting shipping information from our Kickstarter backers in preparation for launch day. More to come…

And as always, if you have questions or feedback drop us a line.

Thanks!

-John and the @flomies