Hey everyone, hope you are having a great weekend. Unlike the regular monthly update, I wanted to drop-in today and share some quick updates that I didn’t want to wait for the remaining of the month.

I.MX95 booting up

I am excited to share that after 2 weeks of intense testing for DDR-bring up, we have the I.MX95 booting up. Here are some screenshots of U-boot and the Linux kernel boot.

This is a big milestone for us 🎉, because the core components are now functional - SoC cores, Power Management, DDR and eMMC. Here is the updated checklist now -

⚠️ We have been able to boot up the board at 50% of the max supported DDR speed right now and are working on further tuning and optimization.

One last addition to the keyboard

I know we shared that we signed off on the design, but a lot of you folks have voiced concerns on the missing arrow-key part - we were internally divided on it as well when we were optimizing the layout. Our only problem in adding the 4-keys was lack of space on the Keyboard extension.

I wanted to give it a shot again, and luckily we landed on a solution that works. The Mecha (super) key is now a 5D button with centre-push. The 4 directional movements will be mapped as arrow keys and the center-push will continue to work as the Super key. This brings back dedicated arrow key support to the keyboard 🎉

The X on the button will be slightly raised compared to the other action buttons to allow easy movements!

We’ve finished testing and designing with this new 5D button over the last 7 days, and have incorporated them in the PCB. The Keyboard and Gamepad pre-production PCB has been submitted for fabrication 🏭 a couple of hours ago.

Mechanical validations underway

Over the past two weeks we have released pre-production designs for all our major components, and their sample development is now underway. We are working on an expedited schedule and are expecting all samples to be ready by 7th October, so that we can sign-off for production die by mid-October.

These parts are carefully designed for manufacturability, endurance with requirements tolerances and are now ready for DFM testing.

Releasing the LTE Add-on 📡

We were originally going to go-live with the Add-on earlier today, but we are awaiting some testing results in our target regions before we roll out the update - we will now be publishing on 🗓️ 22nd September.

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We want to reiterate that we remain grateful for support, and without your contribution bring the Comet in the real world would not have been remotely possible.

Thank you and have a great weekend!

Shoaib & Mecha team