[Community] Status of OpenPhoenux project

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Hi all,
good news below...

Am 28.08.2012 um 14:49 schrieb Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller:

> Hi all,
> after some time with rare news (holidays - not really for
> me but some contributors) I have enough to say for
> another status update.
> 
> 
> 1) GTA04-Production
> 
> ...
> 
> So the only news I have is that they are now continuing to
> work. But unfortunately no finalization date.

Well, still no finalization date yet, but I have received the first
batch of boards produced with the new soldering stencil
and production process.

Quality is very good - better than we have ever seen before!

So it is indeed the DM3730CBP chip that shows some
warpage if heated to ~250 C during soldering. This squeezes
some of the BGA balls so that they touch their neighbor and
make short circuits. It appears that we now do understand this
misbehavior completely and have found good  counter-measures...

So I will notify the group tour participants on our backlog list so that
you can e.g. supply changes of address. Then, we can ship the next
handful of boards within this week.

All other group tour boards are planned to be produced and shipped
in the next weeks (needs more than 1 week, because producing,
testing, flashing NAND, packing etc. also takes some time).

Looking back in the history of this project, this was not the first
technical blocking point we finally did move away. The most
important ones were (in sequence):

1. choosing components that work together and we (small team) can really buy them
2. squeezing everything into the existing GTA01/02 case
3. being 100% successful in PCB layout for 8 layers and fulfilling *all* design rules
4. getting things into production (there are ~250 components)
5. and now finally raising production yield to a sane level

Each one was quite a big challenge and most of them were
fun to solve. Except the last one, because we could not contribute
very much to a solution (except doing some more X-Ray organized
by this community! Thanks Alex!).

Here is a picture that shows how we feel now:

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