18:16 <d1b2> <jsl> It's great to see all of the work being done on the software front, and I wish I could contribute. As far as the hardware goes, the 9/9 update said; "We should have a much better feel for the timeline in January." Now that January is behind us, could we please get an update on the order backlog? Please understand that I'm not complaining, and have exhibited extraordinary patience regarding my now two-year old order. I am very sympathetic to you

18:16 <d1b2> during all the difficulties and I thank you for sticking with it!

19:21 <d1b2> <esden> Hi @jsl, first of all thank you for you patience. I will be writing a new update for the CS page soon. That said, we got sponsorship from Screaming Circuits to assemble 200 Glasgows. This will cover the "early bird" units. That is a very small number though, we have to build another 2000 to fulfill the campaign. Since a while now we knew that it will be prohibitively long to assemble the 2k units on our venerable Quad 4000C PnP machine. It takes

19:21 <d1b2> almost an hour for the machine to populate just 4 boards. So we went down the path of upgrading our shop with a new machine. This took all of our attention the last 2ish months to accomplish. New workshop, new three phase rotary converter, new compressor and air handling, the machine itself. Training from the vendor. I was posting the activities around that on Mastodon. Here is the thread: https://chaos.social/@esden/109606683644831869 and here are the

19:21 <d1b2> first assembly results on the new machine: https://chaos.social/@esden/109784811937091003 So the new machine got installed this past week. It will take a bit before we start assembling Glasgows on it though. Probably another few weeks. That is for the PCBs. We also are fighting the enclosures. I have done a bunch of upgrades and redesigns to make it more versatile and easier to manufacture. Because of Chinese New Year I don't have the new prototype of

19:21 <d1b2> the case in my hands yet. But they should be finished on the 15th, then ship to me from China. If that case prototype turns out to have all the issues fixed I will finally press go on a proper manufacturing run. The lead time on those is 4weeks from the moment that the design is submitted approved and production run payed for. So lot's happening. And we are getting closer. 🙂

19:23 <d1b2> <jsl> Great news! Thanks for the update and the quick reply Pitor.

19:47 <d1b2> <esden> For some additional PnP goodness. This is iCEBreaker FPGA assembly test from last week. https://chaos.social/@esden/109793824763834026 and here is the same board panel assembly on my old machine. https://youtu.be/BSVVRepbt-0 (I mis remembered how long the assembly took. It is about 14min on the old machine. In any case the speed up is significant!)