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Wow, what a lot of work! Time really flies if you have a lot of work to do... in case you are wondering what we have been doing, well, here is some update.
1. Production at CircuitCo
CircuitCo (the company that produces the Pandora PCBs) has really improved during the last weeks! They hired a lot of new staff, bought new machines and outsourced some (easier) projects to be able to concentrate on special jobs like the Pandora production.
There now is a quality assurance and production manager for the Pandora project who communicates with us, and yes, we finally get answers to eMails, questions - communication has surely improved.
While he still needs some time to dive into this complicated project, he seems to handle everything quite good already.
We also have a schedule, we should have about 3300 finished boards early April... that should be almost all Batch 1 orders. Of course, we'll try to build them as fast as possible, though we surely continue to test every single board to be working. Better be safe than sorry!
After that, it's resurrection time!
One thing we also didn't know when we started all this is that such complicated boards can have quite a high failure rate in production - sometimes up to 10% (and that's 400 boards!)
Well, there are multiple steps to build these boards, 8 layers with a lot of very small parts soldered to it... if only one part is off by 0.1mm, it might lead to a non-working board, or a board with partial faults.
These boards go onto a bone pile and then it's time to try and fix them - or remove the expensive parts (like the SoC, the WiFi Module, etc.) so that they can be reused on a new board.
You never know how many will be unrecoverable, but we sure hope not too many. As Batch 2 is planned to happen shortly after Batch 1, it might be some of the late Batch 1 preorderers will get a Batch 2 unit.

We'll keep you informed!

2. Production in UK / Germany
While CircuitCo were busy building boards, we were busy as well. Not just with assembly, but also with organization (don't underestimate the amount of work needed to get Batch 2 started... it's A LOT more than I personally imagined!). Aditionally, boards that arrived here that were partly broken needed to be thoroughly tested and packed up with an explanation for CC about what's wrong with them. This also takes a lot of time - I personally needed two full days to check 30 boards (and was able to repair 10 of them myself, yay!). I think I'm now 4 weeks behind with replying to my eMails... there's so much work to do I really don't know where to start.

The LCD Cables have all been soldered now, however, quite a few of them were broken from the very beginning. With the ones that broke from the start and the few ones that still break now and then, we are about 300 cables short. No big deal, as the next 2000 are already in production - and yes, they are from a new company who did extensive testing, so no more purple haze issues!

The most annoying thing about the LCD Cables that were broken from the very beginning is though: We need to disassemble the cases again and replace the LCD cable with a new one... this takes about 10 minutes per unit, so 100 broken LCD cables mean additional two workdays!
That's where we really need to say THANKS to all of you who supported us with upgrading or buying the 7-Day-Pandoras! We really are swamped with work, and the additional money helps us a lot!
And sorry to those who can't afford it, but you can be sure we wouldn't do this if it wouldn't be necessary, those guys really help building YOUR unit as well!

3. Batch 2 progressing
As Batch 2 should start as quickly as possible after Batch 1 is finished, we are also organizing a lot of things right now.
The 4000 batteries for Batch 2 have already been produced and are currently sailing to UK. We already got cases for the first 800 units of Batch 2, which gives us a good start. Nevertheless, production for the remaining 3200 should start soon as well. Same goes for the LCD cables.
The next batch of Nubs has been ordered as well as the bare PCBs. The parts are either already lying at CC or are reserved at the distributor and ready to be delivered.

4. Production at other facilities?
As you know, there's been a lot of talk about moving to other facilities to speed up production or make it more reliable, etc. Well, that is, only if CC wouldn't work properly, but right now, they seem to be doing a good job.
They are able to produce about 800 PCBs per month right now, which is good enough for us, as we also need to build and test the units, which also takes time.

We contacted quite a few companies asking for quotatíons for Pandora PCB production. And it sure showed the Pandora is not your simple, common PCB.
The big companies either didn't want to start with orders lower than 10.000 or were booked by Apple (yep, Apple fully books multiple factories at the same time!). The smaller companies either had a long leadtime (up to 20 weeks before production would start), couldn't do