Last week, Manel left for Shenzhen to oversee the assembly of the 2,000 Dygma Raise pre-orders.
He is taking charge of doing the IQC - incoming quality control - of all the components and will be there until we start shipping all the keyboards.
Much to our dismay, the quality control checks have been taking longer than expected.
We detected some quality problems with the metal pieces, such as the joint covers and the top panels. The joint covers weren’t fitting properly to the base. They had to fix these by hand.
There were also some wobbling issues detected in some of the top panels so we had to check all of them one by one.
The good news is this means that the quality control procedure is working well! No component is being left unchecked. Every little issue is detected and fixed. The only downside is that it is delaying the process by a few days.
Instead of starting the assembly of the 100 units on Monday, we had to start 3 days later, and instead of 100 units, we are assembling 180. So the trade-off isn’t all that bad 😅
There was one big issue we had that involved the LED drivers of the PCBs.
The Raise has 2 LED drivers, one on each side. This means that we need 4,000 units of these microchips. The problem was that the factory didn't manage the orders very well.
We only had 2,000 units for the left side and 200 for the right. UH-OH. 😳
There are lots of components that are fairly interchangeable, like resistors and capacitors but there are some things like LED microchips where you have to choose a manufacturer and then stick with them. The LED driver is manufactured by a Taiwanese company and they have a Chinese brand as well. If all the stock sells out then you have to wait for the factory to make new chips, which is a 14-week lead time or similar!
What probably happened was that the factory was banking on there being enough stock to just buy when they needed, but then there wasn't! We were caught in a sticky situation and we couldn't just change the chip because it would be too much work because then we would have to recertify.
Luckily, the factory found some stock this week! PHEW. 😅
We are preparing the assembly of the microchips to the right-side PCBs. After mounting them all, we will test them asap.
Overall, the assembly is still a work-in-progress.
We have already received and checked the other components such as the keycaps, keycap-switch puller, cables, Neuron components, etc.
We also have the final travel cases with our modifications.
Despite the delay, we pushed on with the pre-production assembly. However, we are still waiting on validating the other metal components so we can continue in full swing.
Limited Raise Deilor Edition
Other exciting news is that we have started building the Limited Raise Deilor Edition keyboards. Oooooooooo 😯
There were 13 people who ordered a limited edition keyboard where they could personalize their Raise by choosing the color of their metal panel and have a name or image engraved onto it.
The image below is an example of the metal panel with one of the artworks that was sent to us by a backer.
Configurator Software
As for the configurator software, our latest update included the macros feature. However, it still had a few bugs that needed to be fixed.
They are actually more complex than we thought! 😅
We’ve decided to release the software without the macros feature for now. We will continue working on this parallel to improving the software’s UI.
Our main priority is to refine all the updates that we’ve made in the last few weeks and make the software compatible with Windows, Linux, and Mac before we start shipment.
Currently, we are implementing the layouts of the other languages into the software.
So that’s all for now with our short update but we will share more information when we have more news from China!
- Dygma Team
