Hey all,
I'm failing at the chapter again this week, mainly because it's been kinda insanely busy as we ramp up for Vidar (and another product release). Just getting a new product on the line is a pretty big undertaking, and the Vidar is complicated by the fact that it has a lot of new assembly operations (or at least, stuff we've only been doing at the "craft build" level, like Ragnarok.) I'm happy to report that the heatsinks are in, chassis assembly continues quickly, and we're only awaiting two things to make this real:
1. The first article production board from the PCB assembly house. This is what they give us to check and see if everything is in the right place. Once we confirm this, there's a bit more waiting for...
2. Production boards from the PCB assembly house. Then we can start finishing up the assemblies and getting them on the burn-in rack.
(Ah, and I just remembered...I better send an empty chassis Vidar out for photography, like, today. Argh.)
Aaaannd...remember that prototype I mentioned that just "started up and ran," and I was wondering what kind of hell I'd have to walk through to compensate for it going so easily? Found it. We have another product--actually series of products--that I just discovered yesterday that our approach would only work for 1 out of 3 of the planned products. The good news is that we haven't bought any parts yet for the other two, and the better news is that it doesn't affect the introduction of the one that works. However, it's going to be a monumental pain in the rear end to get this working right. It's even more irritating that the product sounds great, despite the problem--Mike Moffat has one and doesn't want to give it up. The problem is too high THD at some operational levels--we're talking 0.2-0.5% here, really not what you'd expect from a modern solid-state device. That, and inductively coupled noise. The noise isn't too hard to resolve, but the THD problem may be interesting. We're working up some new approaches for testing.
(And, for the engineers here, nope, it's not oscillating at 50MHz or anything like that, which can cause both problems. We know the base cause--it's related to a specific series of custom parts--but I can't get into details since it would give too much away.)
Beyond that, we're in the middle of the spring "slow time," so I'm looking forward to ramping things up with Vidar (and a couple of other announcements to be made shortly.)
All the best,
Jason
or
next to it. There is a good summary of usage here (see page 4).
