Hey everyone - hope you all had a great week. Time to make it better.

Towards the end of the July we received the first set of boards for the Comet (+1). Here are the pics of the Comet EVT board and assembly in all its glory!

As soon as they arrived we moved on to the next high risk item - getting the board to boot up. I am elated (jumping with joy! 🕺) to share that the boards booted up after 3 days of hardware testing and fixing of few power delivery issues. Here is the video of the Kernel booting up to login on serial console.

This means the processor, memory, EMMC and Power Management are working fine. Next up, we decided to take up the display. Last week, the display also started working. You can check the default Wayland compositor shows up and the touch demo below.

We will continue to test and bring up more peripherals in August, and hopefully by end of this month we will close the EVT validation and testing.

Other Updates

Pogo Pins: Sometime in June, we started the manufacturing of custom pogo pins for the Comet, and they are now ready. The Comet will house the female contacts as planned, and the extensions will have the female pins. The one on the Comet will be sealed tight, with no airgap. Any guesses on how we're doing this? 🤔

Keyboard: The Keyboard extension is our most complicated extension, and has been our focus for 2 months now. The EVT units of the enclosure and PCB finally arrived, and we have tons of issues to fix 🫣 as expected.

The keyboard extension is undergoing improvements in mechanical, form and pcb design and will be released for EVT manufacturing next week. Happy to share that the keyboard will now use QMK firmware, making it easier for you to reconfigure and test with it. Also, you will be able to flash new firmware with the Comet itself via its GPIO-USB 🤩

Gamepad: Actively being developed right now, and targeted to be released for EVT manufacturing alongside the Keyboard next week.

GPIO: We have some new ideas here on how to make it more DIY friendly and capable, we will post these ideas soon and have you all pitch in!

LLMs on Comet: Two months back, a couple of guys reached out to me to get their hands dirty with running LLM models on the Comet. I gave them a problem statement to train a custom LLM model to generate Linux Commands offline on the Comet (why: https://xkcd.com/1168/). They built a complete dataset of popular linux commands (~9K), and fine-tuned LLAMA-3.2-1b to do exactly this. Here is the video and the link to the model on HuggingFace [https://huggingface.co/mecha-org/linux-command-generator-llama3.2-1b]

GRUB on Comet: One of our pilot user has been able to run GRUB on the Comet. We are looking to simplify our boot and flashing process. I will share more on this soon, and we can get some more ideas from Embedded Linux maestros here on the server.

Next Steps

• From a hardware point of view, our next pre-launch blocker is pre-certification for CE, FCC, UKCA and ISED. The preliminary assessment has already started. Ensuring we comply with all the standards for these certifications will ensure there is no minimal design re-work once we go for full certification in October.
• By the end of this month, we will also be releasing the 'Design Validation Test' prototype design for manufacturing. This will fix all the hardware/mechanical issues observed in EVT, and this batch is planned for external review as well. This means we will start pilot shipments for the new Comet with the DVT boards sometime after 15th September, as per current timelines.
• We will also be working with an antenna design facility next month to help us design the 4G antenna provisions into the hardware.
• We are working full-throttle on the next version of Mechanix OS I can't wait to share updates. We will start talking about it more towards the end of this month.

Launch when?

'Winter Launch is coming', we are currently blocked by a few to-do items in our list and are looking at having more clarity in a few more weeks. Our priority is to ensure any high-risk items that could delay production are addressed pre-launch. We are planning a YouTube Live 📹 by the end of this month, wherein we will be able to share a more concrete plan.

Thank you for reading!