Kickstarter

Dear Kickstarters,

A few weeks ago the factory received the new tooled cases to accommodate the larger CR2450 battery. They assembled a couple of pieces initially to evaluate and addressed some assembly issues. They are now building dozens of samples with the final toolings. The images below show the SMT (Surface Mount Technology) running boards and attaching components to final pilot sample boards.

 I am in China this week and will be able to provide further updates and show working samples in next week. There will be a few weeks of further watch and software testing of the samples and we look forward to providing you updates as we finalize and confirm reliability of pilot samples. Then we can estimate target production deliveries.

Thanks for your patience and look forward to giving you further updates.

Sincerely,

Donald

Dear Kickstarters,

We appreciate your patience the last two months as we have completed tooling revisions to the case and internal components to support the larger coin cell battery to hit our original battery life target. At this time all of the off-tool parts have arrived at the factory for the revised case and PCB board that supports the larger coin cell battery. The surface mount process is now underway and in the next couple weeks  we will be able to show many photos of the production process and final pilot samples. 

In next update we will be able to show video of the pilot samples, finalized time dials, the TIMER functionality that was requested, and improvements made to WORLD TIME function. 

Sincerely,

Donald

Thanks again for all of your incredible patience and support. As informed in the last update, based on testing results from our pilot production units in November, we decided to make a change to a much larger battery (2x capacity) to ensure that we are able to reach (and in some cases exceed) our target battery life. As we mentioned, the new CR2450 battery luckily didn't impact case size significantly, but did require our team to redesign internal boards. Also in the early pilot production assembly we had encountered some yield issues during production with the touch panels and the assembly team made recommendations to change the connector on PCB for the touch panel, along with a few other improvements. 

We have now received the demo boards based on these changes. All the testing this last week went very well and the changes look good. We will continue testing over the next two weeks. The revised module tooling, and case modifications are also completed and in production. Unfortunately we are now in the "midst" of Chinese New Year, which means virtually all development comes to a halt for about three-four weeks as all production staff for every company and supplier travel back to their hometowns, some 300 million people on the move, for a few weeks as we begin the new YEAR OF THE SNAKE. 

We will provide updates and pictures in  March as we start to receive finalized parts for our pilot production build. We appreciate your patience and we are working hard to deliver your Touch Time watch to you in coming months.

One specification that is not very widely discussed or even provided from most coin cell battery manufacturers is the variance of internal resistance over the life of the coin cell battery. In fact most manufacturers don't publish this data since it could arguably show a "derating" of up to 50% of stated battery lifetime. Through significant testing and research we discovered that although a new battery starts at below 20 Ohms, when having high pulse drains due to LED and touch swipes we reach a 45 Ohm internal resistance at significantly below the full 240mAh capacity of the CR2032 battery. We discovered that with the new charge pump added to circuitry at internal resistances of 45 Ohms we get to a point where the CR2032 can’t drive circuit, thereby causing MCU resets. This means that although the battery capacity at this level is an estimated 40-60% of total capacity, we may get resets, which in our minds is the effective end of life and shorter than our one year target battery life.

The main selling feature of TOUCH TIME is a significant long battery life. Therefore, we have to move to a larger capacity coin cell battery as well as one that can handle higher mA loads. Fortunately we are able to move to the CR2450 higher capacity battery that is more than 2X of the current CR2032 we had planned on using. Using this larger capacity battery won’t grow thickness of watch due to extra space we had available and only slight increase in case length. However, this change will cause a delay in our production schedule. 

Attached are some pictures of our current pilot production components and we are still proceeding to build a few additional pilot production units with current battery/hardware solution. In the coming month we still plan to pass some of these samples to Kickstarter Reviewers we have already selected so they can test the watches provide feedback to our supporters regarding the TOUCH TIME watch. 

We are also working to quickly modify the components to support the change to the larger capacity battery and in coming weeks can formalize the target final pilot production build and final production and shipment schedule. Stefan and myself are also scheduled to be in China week of Jan.21st before Chinese New Year and can provide additional updates at that time. 

We appreciate your patience and we are working hard to finalize and perfect the TOUCH TIME watch for you here in early 2013. It goes without saying that we value all of your support immeasurably and we regret this delay. We are hugely proud of our product and we will continue to update you on our progress  as we perfect the first, and only non-rechargeable battery powered capacitive touch digital watch. 

Thanks for your support! 

Sincerely, 

Donald

We are back after meeting with our factory in China earlier this week. For the last several weeks, we have been evaluating the latest working samples shown in the last video update. We continue to make great progress and are eager to get our watches on the wrists of our Kickstarter supporters.