A quick progress report.  MicroPython 1.17 dropped on September 2 2021 which meant that I finally had an officially released binary with support for the new wESP32 with 16 MB flash.

To remove the biggest bottleneck in production called "me" from the equation as much as possible, I had my CM Kingtop build a fixture so they could program and test them, instead of me still having to do that with every board.  They built a nice fixture:

Much better looking than my fixture hacked together from two perf boards. ;)  That worked, but hurt your hand when running too many boards.  Big improvement.

Kingtop finished populating the through-hole parts and programmed and tested all boards:

They reported two boards that failed on initial test, but they were able to correct the problem.  So an initial failure rate of 0.2%, and 0% after rework, that speaks very well to their build quality and processes.  Believe me, I've seen much much worse!

They are ready to ship them now and it's still looking good for getting stock mid-September.

Now I only have to harass Mouser some more to try and get them to send me a PO for the new part numbers generated for this revision, after begging for months already.  But why do something ahead of time when you can do it when it's too late, right? 🙄