Finally the first batch is produced

Again too late with my update. There were a lot little delays adding up when one thinks, lets just wait until this is resolved to give some good news and a solid estimate. Then the next little problem occurs. Us being super busy with two research projects and a large Epaper display project for train stations (we got some Erlang in there!) didn‘t help.

Now for the news: Everything was on track for production when we heard that the manufacturer (who normally sources most of the parts) got a bad batch of Ethernet connectors. With the electronics parts crisis you might have heard of probability for bad parts and even forgeries also increases. We were already hit by that with the secure element crypto chip we have on the board. When the Ethernet connectors were resolved we heard that the PMOD connectors were stuck at customs and were going back to the distributor where they normally disappear for a while until they get relisted. This was Brexit fallout, the distri was in UK and apparently not up to speed how to declare good properly. After these connectors were sourced, soldering the boards was finally started (not that they told us that, not very talkative these hardware guys).

Next we heard of them was that the boards were delivered but there was a soldering error (LEDs were placed the wrong way round, the D in LED stands for diode so that kind of matters). We got one debugged board to get started with the final software adaptions, while the whole batch of 350 boards is being reworked at the manufacturer.

First GRiSP2 board in our hands

We are working on the software to put on the boards now and especially the certificate we want to put in the secure element. This will allow connecting to a SaaS we are currently building and will get you future owners of GRiSP2 some free services. Next week we ship development boards to all of our devs (we are a distributed company) to speed up driver adaptions etc. The final boards were different enough from the prototype that this wasn’t feasible enough earlier.

So now the ball is in our court and we are busily getting the software side together. And then we’ll ship finally!