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We’ve been working hard to try and get development done for a full production run of FloJacks. The great news is that we’re able to read a wide range of NFC Forum tags. Furthermore, we’ve successfully proven out writing to Type 2 tags from many different manufacturers. There have, however, been some unforeseen challenges we’re still overcoming.
For instance, reading credit card sized tags like these has been tough given the small FloJack antenna size and limited power. The original case design had the PCB mounts along the case walls preventing the maximum antenna size possible. Given that the antenna is hollow we shifted the mounts to the center to increase the antenna area. This has boosted the effectiveness of reading larger inlays.
We’ve also encountered issues with sourcing some of the key parts of our original design, like the audio jack. We built all our FloJack prototypes using the Square audio jacks (since getting them was free and easy) but as it turns out the size and trim of these jacks is very unique. We tried every vendor we could find, but no one carried anything remotely similar to the Square jack we made our designs for. We finally gave up and went with something larger. We have to do a PCB redesign to accomodate the longer audio jack. The impact of the notch you see to here (left) is that it slices through several key electrical traces.
So we’ll need to free up new board space to re-route these traces. To do so we had to choose a smaller and surface mount battery holder (right).
Needless to say, it’s been quite an adventure to get this far. We suspect that the effect of these changes will push our shipment date out by at least a month. We’re currently shooting to start shipping units on the week of April 22, 2013. To pull this off, we will need to get our Electrical and Mechanical designs tested and signed off by March 19th, 2013.
PCB production, population, and assembly takes about 3 weeks but Mechanical tooling for the new case design could take as long as 4 weeks. Our choice of a through-hole jack brace -although more robust- requires a cantilever tool that is more complicated to make than a simple mold.
Overall though, we’re stoked with the improvements we’ve made. Based on the feedback we’ve gotten from our beta testers, we think it will greatly improve user experience and the life span of the product. We’re excited to get the FloJacks shipped out to our customers as soon as we can so we hope you can bare with us a bit longer.
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This reply was modified 11 years, 8 months ago by
Richard.
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This reply was modified 11 years, 8 months ago by
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This reply was modified 11 years, 8 months ago by
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We’re still waiting on the factories. We got some production samples and we weren’t happy with the enclosure finish 🙁 We’re preparing another update to keep everyone informed but below you can see the main quality issue we were not ok with.
[Our previous update can be found on our Blog here]
Richard
Thanks everyone for your patience. After slipping so many days, weeks, months … it’s no wonder that you’re upset. We’ve been using the FloJack internally for over a year, making it better as we go, but producing it in bulk has introduced issues we never expected. We’ve gotten through them and just waiting on our manufacturer to finish the first batch of boards and send them to us. Here is a picture of the latest boards coming off the production line:
Once we have them in hand we will being assembling and shipping them out immediately.
thanks again for your patience.
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