Wow, time sure can fly. In the last month we mostly chipped away at all the very non sexy parts of starting a new company – most of which I wont be posting about here. We are excited that it looks like we may be bringing on a real mechanical engineer – which should make all our products better.
In terms of our mills the work of the last month went into the new electronics. Again nothing very sexy to talk about – we just decided to split the design over two boards and change a bunch of connectors and a few parts.
The reason for all the changes is because we found having everything all on one board – while cheaper to build – leads to a huge bundle of wires all terminating in a tight space. This in turn leads to unpredictable stresses on the wires as things are initially installed. We were worried about failure in the field due to this stress on the wires so we split the design into a motor driving board and a controller board. So far we are fairly happy with the new design – it is easier to assemble and debug. Looking forward to what the next round of testers have to say.
We also decided to use slightly more expensive screw post connectors to help ensure the electronics could be easily installed or swapped out for future upgrades. Even simple soldering patches are the definition of not fun once the units are together. The new connectors should also enable us to send out upgrade or repair modules if needed.
So the good news is things are really starting to speed up again – so we should be running another round of testing soon. We will be contacting people who asked to be beta testers when we are ready – and posting content describing how the test were going here.