Pocket P.C. Development Updates

D.V.T. 2 PCBs were sent into production yesterday. We expect to receive them within 10-12 days.
We have posted the latest PCB stackup and schematic for this production run on GitHub.

This hopefully will be the last production run before P.V.T. (the last step before mass production) where we hope to build a substantial amount of units if results of this run are successful and requires little to no changes.

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how did the D.V.T. run go? @sourceparts

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Do you have any estimates of when pre-ordered units will be shipped ?
Thanks for doing this amazing project.

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We are aiming to ship in late November.
The injection molds for the plastic enclosure have been ordered and currently are being made.

We haven’t assembled the D.V.T. units yet.
We did a production run of Original Popcorn Computers and as a result of significant testing, we determined that a few changes are necessary to the design. Fortunately, these changes are not show stoppers so we will go ahead and assemble the 25pcs of D.V.T. Pocket P.C.s late next week.
Original Popcorn and Pocket P.C. share most of the same USB-C Power Delivery circuitry.

Here is the latest look at a Pocket P.C. prototype.
This prototype has a sample rubber keyboard in black. The rubber in the mass production version will be frosted white to allow for the backlight to shine through with black silkscreen on top for the lettering.

We expect the first samples of the plastic enclosure to be available by October 20th.

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A future stealth version…

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Looks already good :wink:

Hello together,

its November now, do you have any new updates for us?

I am eagerly awaiting the pre ordered device and cannot wait to have it here in germany :smiley:

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Hi,

Please any update about pocketcomputer?

I want to order one asap!

They have a blog here where they recently posted an update :slightly_smiling_face:

Yeah and then they do their best hiding it on their site. But a good product is worth more than a slick website.

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Thanks for the feedback.
We are planning to add a link to our blog on the Pocket P.C. product page soon.

@sourceparts is it nearly time for a small project update?

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We just got out of the factory and will be posting an update on our blog and sending out a newsletter update within the next few days. We learned a lot and have lots to share.

For now, here’s a picture of 25 Pocket P.C. D.V.T. boards fresh out of the reflow oven.

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Nice and toasty straight from the oven :+1:

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:cricket: :cricket: :cricket: :cricket:

Sorry for being out of touch, we are extensively examining all aspects of the product. We had thorough discussions with our manufacturer to make sure nothing is missed.

Testing also took longer than expected. As a result of our exhaustive testing, we decided we will have to do a second D.V.T. We recently had a large and productive meeting with representatives from all the factories involved in manufacturing Pocket P.C.'s parts so make sure that everyone is on the same page.

We made a few mistakes to the PCB design and would feel more comfortable to make sure we correct them in a second D.V.T. before going to the P.V.T. phase.

As you can see below, the keyboard is almost there.

  • The status LED is a little too bright which causes the blue to bleed into the main keyboard when it’s on.
  • A covering is missing over the LED where the newly added buttons are which is why the keyboard is slightly brighter there. We will correct this in the M.P. keyboard covers.
  • The keyboard was silkscreen by hand and the black is a little too thin. We will ask them to do two passes in the M.P.
  • There was a software file glitch at the factory which caused the right-most button on the bottom to show question marks instead of the actual characters. We will ask them to correct and carefully review the silkscreen stencil against the proof before doing the silkscreen in the future.
  • Some characters are hard to read so we will be making them bigger in the final version.

I’ve taken a lot of pictures and videos which we have to edit together and are planning on sharing those soon.

As for the PCB, we made a change log document and have since corrected 90% of the items.
We are commissioning an outside engineering firm to double-check everything They will review the schematic and layout to make sure we don’t miss anything and will give us an outside opinion.

You can view the change log here:
Pocket P.C. Rev 2.1 Change Log

As for software, we will be contracting an outside embedded development firm to upstream everything from U-boot specific changes including Device Tree, Linux Kernel changes including Device Tree, Buildroot configuration and an Armbian build configuration.

This means that we will be supporting Armbian in addition to Debian.

The above is a summary of what will be in our next update. Now that the testing phase is over, I can devote time to writing our newsletter and blog updates.

If anyone has emailed us in the past few weeks, we will respond to all your questions soon, I apologize for falling behind on customer service but please know that we are dedicating all our resources to making an excellent product without blemishes or flaws.

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looking good! nice to see that your team is finding and fixing problems this is more than half of the fun of backing a new idea/product!

Thanks for the update and photo :). The change log was great to read.