This update’s for the logistics nerds instead of the techies. Your first product is a supply chain You may have wondered why businesses can be built on importing existing products from overseas and marking it up a lot. Importing is an arcane process! You need to find a reputable source, get and test samples, arrange… Continue reading The small link at the end of the chain
Category: Pickup
Boards, bugs, better interface
Hi — after getting shiny new boards last month, this month we’ve been back to grinding on code. I’ll do my best to make this interesting, but no promises. Hardware We got around to testing all of our mainboards from our batch of 50 (Yes, that’s 49 boards above. I have the other one.) 47… Continue reading Boards, bugs, better interface
The production boards are looking autumnal.
We have been boring lately. Though in general, most of the work of manufacturing is just grinding, on the supply chain as well as on our own engineering tasks. That’s one reason I was holding off on an update. The other reason is I was hoping to hit some more milestones to report back. Got mixed news… Continue reading The production boards are looking autumnal.
Testing 1, 2, 1000
The process by which you manufacture a product at scale is itself a product, and that’s why it’s so much harder to make something for lots of people than it is to make one for yourself. The process by which you manufacture a product at scale is itself a product, and that’s why it’s so much harder to make something for lots of people than it is to make one for yourself.The process by which you manufacture a product at scale is itself a product, and that’s why it’s so much harder to make something for lots of people than it is to make one for yourself. (Never mind making it usable and supporting it.) Here’s Jeremy with more on that.
Solid as a rock
The hardware is solid now, and final hardware development is wrapped up. Next, we’re making the tools for production. Read on for what we’ve been up to. Mechanicals The final prototype came out nicely. It feels even better than it looks, as you can infer from Jeremy’s expression when I handed him the assembled final… Continue reading Solid as a rock
A lot of money was spent
We’ve been wading through a bunch of details for the last several weeks, but they’ve now coalesced into things we can describe. We have a lot to talk about. Electronics A few little bugs in that yellow board, some due to hand assembly of parts which will be machine assembled in production. Mostly mechanical placement,… Continue reading A lot of money was spent
Debugging hardware is hard
If you want a very technical illustration of why, as they say, hardware is hard, follow along as I debug a communications problem between Pickup’s two main chips. Day 1 I was working on the bus interface between Pickup’s MCU (the STM32) and its WiFi radio (an ESP32) only to find that the STM32 UART… Continue reading Debugging hardware is hard
Forward March
March has been productive. We left off last time with a major decision to change out a key component, the microcontroller that handles all of our sensor IO and power management. We’ve had our heads down for the last couple of weeks working on that and a few other things. tl;dr: New mainboard prototypes have… Continue reading Forward March