It's been a while since my last update, but a lot has happened!

For a start I ordered production boards.  This time I decided to try another company than Elecrow.  My local CM had told me the boards could be better, especially the lead free HASL finish wasn't ideal in flatness to work well with tiny DFN packages.  I had received "spam" (unsolicited email) from several Chinese companies offering PCB services.  After getting quotes from several of them, I chose a Chinese company called XR-PCB because they seemed responsive and easy to work with, panelized my board for free and their quote was reasonable.  I went with matte black solder mask and immersion silver finish.  When I received the boards I was very happy: they are beautiful!

The CM was also impressed with them: nice finish, good registration and alignment, nice flat finish.

So I collected all my components and they started a build.  Meanwhile I also received a new shipment of batteries to be ready for production:

On Tuesday the CM started production and I received a "first article" panel:

Definitely an advantage of living in a city where the CM is literally down the street! :)  The first article boards tested out fine, no issues.  So I gave the green light to finish the rest.  Which I received today:

It's happening people, almost there!

In the meantime, I'm working on the product brief / manual, and need to update the web site.  I've also been hard at work creating a test fixture.  Using that I will be able to test these more thoroughly and faster than testing them by hand as I do with my current production boards.  Funny thing: the test fixture ended up being a more complex design than the product it will be testing:

I'll be using a TI MSP430G2 Launchpad board as programmer, it will plug in on top of the main board.  There are two programmable loads to test the 5V and auxiliary outputs under various load conditions.  There is a "battery emulator", which is in fact a shunt regulator.  I'll be able to use it to test the behaviour of the DUT under various "battery levels".  Controlling it all is an STM32 which is configured the same as the Espruino Pico, so I will be able to use the marvellous Espruino firmware for quick development of the test functions.  Initially I had intended to drop an actual Espruino Pico module on the board, but I ended up needing more pins than those broken out to the castellated edges, so I opted to so a bare board design.  The remaining functions on the board are a beefy power supply and a USB hub to be able to run the Launchpad board and the Espruino from a single USB cable going to the test PC.

So I'm now in a position to start selling these in limited quantities (manually tested for now, and lacking documentation).  I have decided to position them as a "professional" B2B product initially, and I'm holding off on making them generally available through a store front for now.  The LiFePO4wered/Pi and /Pi3 will continue to be sold on Tindie for the general public, as long as I have stock.  When stock runs out, the roles will reverse: the LiFePO4wered/Pi+ will become the publicly available product and the legacy products will only be available for volume buys.  This will hopefully give me enough time to get the test fixture and documentation finished before general availability.

Professional customers who want early access and don't mind paying a little extra for manually tested boards can contact me directly and I will be able to get you early samples! :)