To-Do List

• DONE - finish setting up wireless firmware updates
• MAYBE DONE - make sure automatic firmware updates are working well
• IN PROGRESS - send out more phones to hackers. mostly done, recently added more early testers and now shipping more
• DONE - receive clear front covers
• DONE - make PCBAs for remainder of Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and web pre-sales
• DONE - finish the injection mold for the Regular frames
• fix any bugs the hackers have found (found a few, waiting for more)
• DONE - update user manual
• IN PROGRESS assemble remainder of phones
• BLOCKED - ship all phones for regular users (waiting on more feedback from hackers)
• IN PROGRESS: make tutorials.

Recent Activities

We did eventually get good electronics. The PCBAs were delayed due to a few different problems:

• Many of the mic holes were plugged and we had to send them back to be drilled out.
• The vibrator motors had soldering issues. We ended up switching to different ones.

We've been assembling the latest batch of PCBAs into phones. We now have all the electronics needed to ship all phones ordered through Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and our website.

Some orders still can't ship:

• We still can't ship regular phones because of some cracking issues with the plastic. See below for more details.
• Still waiting on 868 LoRa boards (we have them, currently doing quality control). We have all of the 915MHz versions in stock.
• We need issue feedback before we can ship to the non-hackers. This is a major blocker right now.

Issues and Feedback

Thanks to everyone who has filed an issue on Github, or let us know by email. We need anyone who already has a phone to let us know any additional problems you find.

This product was originally conceived as a tool for hackers. Many people who just wanted a simple phone also ended up buying them and we are taking the approach of trying to support that. But it means things like calling and automatic firmware updates need to work at a level we didn't expect to need to support. This is by far not the only issue that has caused delays, but right now it's one of the main reasons we aren't shipping to non-hackers.

Currently the SIP calling is not reliable on any provider we didn't already test with. That's being worked on and should get better within a few firmware releases. Especially if everyone keeps us informed of issues. I have been overwhelmed keeping up with the technical side of things, trying to find a path towards eventually making this project profitable, and responding to people. If you do send feedback on an issue and don't hear back, it will be checked out we just may not get to it immediately.

Current Shipping Plan

As some of you have noticed, more people have been receiving their phones.

We've shipped almost everything we can within the limits of what we have in stock and who is willing to be an early tester. We did recently contact some of you about joining the hackers/early testers and if you replied "yes", those phones are going out and should reach you soon if they haven't already.

So far we've really only shipped to Kickstarter backers because they backed first, but in order to make things happen faster we will be contacting the IndieGoGo and web orders to see if they want to be early testers. Comments below if this is acceptable for you. Feedback welcome from everyone except Noah. ;P

Cracking Plastic Frames

So in some ways the delays have been good because we are catching problems that otherwise would have only been found after we shipped the phones. I'm also learning more about injection molding than I ever thought I'd want to.

Many of the plastic frames are showing stress cracking near the threaded holes that secure the back cover. Cracking can be caused by a variety of factors, but we think primarily it's due to 4 things:

• Polycarbonate is sensitive to hydrocarbons, and the process that we used to add the threads exposed them to oil. Oil makes it easy to have stress cracking.
• The injection mold machine size. Normally you should try to use an injection mold machine that matches the part size. You don't want to use a machine that stores too much plastic in the melted state without quickly turning it into parts because leaving plastic at the injection old temperature for too long degrades it. Ideally the volume of melted plastic the machine holds should be no more than 5x the volume of the part, and ideally more like 1.5x or less. Our frame is large relative to the volume of plastic it uses so it's not easy to find the right machine.
• Injection molded bosses are prone to splitting if the top is flat. Geometries that have a relief near the top of the screw hole tend to tolerate the stresses that lead to cracking better. Our design had a chamfer at the top of the boss, but the injection mold factory left it out.
• Additionally, because of the thickness of the back cover and the height of the screw head, missing countersink meant the screw itself acted like a wedge to split the top of the boss apart.

Right now we have a batch of 1000 plastic frames that were ready to turn into phones before we found the cracking problem. Now those parts are scrap and we are working on replacements. We've modified the injection mold to add back the missing thread relief and currently searching for an injection mold that's both big enough to fit our mold and holds a small enough amount of resin that it doesn't degrade the plastic before it's injected. Due to the relative size mismatch between those two it's not a common machine size, but we should eventually get it sorted out.