We have been hard at work on preparing RISE for mass production. We have ordered the molds for the plastic parts and at the same time we are still working on the electronics and the packaging. Our biggest concern at the moment is noise - the motor is simply too loud. To fight that we had to reduce the speed. Since we are using the same motor driver we did in RollyCat we know it can be driven by PWM but the built-in timers in the Nordic nrf51 series have been giving us a lot of trouble in the past. The way the nrf51 generates PWM is not completely separated from the core and every timer interrupt needs to be serviced. Since the BLE Softdevice is very time critical sometimes it's possible to miss the lower priority timer interrupt and that causes the PWM output to invert (since the output pin is toggled in the interrupt). There is an updated PWM library available for the SOC and we have now implemented that to test if we can improve noise performance without causing other issues. Another thing we are concerned with is if the PWM will interfere with the touch button. We are just testing that now and hopefully we'll have an update on the injection molded parts very soon.

Going to be and exciting summer...