Hey folks, happy July! Here's what's been going on at Opulo this month:
Lead Times
As I mentioned in last month's update, we took some action to more aggressively bring our lead times down, and now we're starting to see the results of this!
Our ratio of LumenPnP/Feeder demand has shifted, so we've been spinning up new workstations and training technicians to keep up with the new balance. Also, the recent hiring we did is starting to show in our internal lead times. Our weekly production quantity is going up and we're on a good pace to bring lead times down. We're still keeping our official lead time as is, but internally we're shipping quite a bit ahead the promised ship date. When we feel good with our buffer, we'll bring the official lead time down.
As always, the official lead time on each product's product page is the most accurate metric for when you'll see your hardware ship! There's a good chance we ship early, but we keep it where it is to ensure we're able to stick to our estimate.
Wide Feeders
Wide feeders are still in R&D, and we're prepping for our first EVT build! The bulk of the work being done has been around the feeder PCB, and drive motors.
I received a tremendous amount of helpful feedback on the feeder schematic, and I've been going through and making adjustments. So far, we've improved the power circuitry to improve efficiency, switched to a microcontroller with more flash space, and generally cleaned up the schematic.
Feeder UART Bootloader
We had a few folks report having trouble flashing firmware to their feeders, and last week we discovered the issue. If you're having this issue, we're sorry for the trouble. Please reach out to us and we'll get you sorted.
A small batch of feeders have a hard time talking back to the STM32CubeProgrammer software, but otherwise work totally fine. TL;DR: Our chip supplier sourced a slightly different version of the RS-485 transceiver we use, it's literally the same part number, just from a different lot. This lot behaves slightly differently when the DE/RE pins are left floating: the previous lot would default itself to a disabled state, the new lot has just enough leakage current to end up being enabled, which causes it to interfere with communication from the UART programmer.
We're fixing this in a few ways. First, the feeder board is getting an immediate up-rev to bias these pins to solve the issue. Second, we've designed a small interposer board that can be quickly soldered onto the feeder PCB and also biases these pins. Third, Thea made a firmware update that actually biases these pins using the STM32 itself using a new method for getting into bootloader mode. However, this update must be flashed over SWD first to re-enable UART programming.
If you'd like to perform the fix yourself, you can check out our docs page on the issue and we can send you interposer boards as soon as we are able. If you're curious about the details, I wrote up a full description in this discord message. And of course, please reach out to us if you'd like for us to perform the fix for you!
Certification Content
At long last, I have sorted through all the footage and notes I took during our process of getting the LumenPnP v4 certified! We often get questions about the certification process, and we're really excited to share the experience with everyone. This time was very smooth, and we actually passed everything on our first try!
I'm deep in the process of editing a video about the whole experience, and I'm hoping to have it on my channel very soon. I'm also working on setting up a website that can act as a central repository for information about shipping hardware, and will start with including information about the certification process.
New Projects
For those that don't yet know, we hired the wonderful Thea Fowers a few months ago, and she's been hard at work on some exciting software projects that we're really looking forward to sharing with you!
Thea came up to visit the Opulo offices last week for some testing, and we're excited to have some stuff to share with y'all very soon.
Reach Out
If you have any feedback, questions, or comments about this update, please don't hesitate to reach out to us here.
Thanks, and we'll see you next month!
-Stephen