Hi everyone!   

Ever heard of the Mooncake Festival?  It's a pretty big holiday around China, with everyone taking at least a week off. It looks really fun, and mooncakes are delicious.  We knew we were going to run into this holiday and have it affect our schedule, but I'd hoped we'd have most of the production done before it occurred.  We didn't quite make it, so we lost about a week from it.  

Everything's back up to speed and here's what's beeng going on with the various aspects of production.

Electronics

This electronics were finished assembly last Monday, testing proceeded all this week, and now 6000 blink(1) electronics are on their way to us.  We have our assembly firm do two kinds of QA test on each blink(1).  The first test is for the RGB LED.  For this, they plug blink(1) into a regulated and current-limited 5VDC source and watch the blink(1) go through its startup light sequence, which goes white->red->green->blue...etc. They make sure the color output is good and there isn't a bad element on the LED.  The second test is for USB functionality. For this, plug blink(1) into a computer and verify it registers as a USB HID device.  If a blink(1) passes these two tests, it's bagged up to be shipped to us.  If it doesn't pass, either the LED is replaced and tested again, or it's just marked "bad" for us to test.

Enclosure

The production lines for the injection molded bottom part and the CNC machined aluminum top part are done and have produced sample parts for us to evaluate.  Those samples have been Fedexed to us and we hope to get them early next week.  It should take about a week to get the total quantity.

Packaging

Final samples of the packaging was sent to us earlier this week for signoff.  We will get these Monday and I trust they'll be good.  It'll take about a week to make them all.  

Applications

The Mac OS X application is almost completed.  For Windows, we're trying out using Mono as the .NET runtime so we can potentially get a Linux application without too much extra effort.  If Mono doesn't work out, we'll switch over to the normal Microsoft .NET runtimes and keep the Mono effort for a Linux version later.  The HTML5 GUI that's common to all OSes is getting really close and I hope to have some screenshots soon.

Thanks everyone!  Have a good weekend.

-=tod