Hey all - Happy Sunday! lets run through the progress updates here.

I know you are all waiting for us to announce the Kickstarter and I am eternally grateful for the patience, our entire launch timeline depends on how the EVT testing goes and July is critical for us to determine our exact timeline. I will keep everyone posted, till then - thanks for reading - and you have a great week ahead.

New Comet PCBs

The PCBs for EVT have arrived 2 days back, and we are now waiting for some critical components to arrive before we start the SMT (assembly). The new ETA for the Comet PCBs to-be-ready for testing and first boot up is 10th July.

These are two in a single panel, this is to optimize pick-n-place and overall SMT process ⚡.

Moving away from Debian

We have been asking ourselves the question for some time now, about the challenge with Debian release schedules, where packages get stale over a period of time, way before the next stable release comes in (Debian operates at 24M release cycles). From Debian point-of-view it makes sense to have this release cycle but considering how fast Wayland and Linux on Mobile is evolving, it will be difficult keeping Mechanix OS synched with latest fixes in projects like mesa and wlroots.

Since the past week, we have shifted focus to Fedora, which operates on 2 major releases every year - we have just started initial work on building the rootfs, and are working on porting mecha-make to use dnf tools. This also brings in more areas to explore, such as Fedora Atomic/Silverblue. People in the community here familiar with Fedora and would like to contribute or share their experiences with us, please do send me a DM.

Also, this does not mean that Debian support goes away. Our officially supported Mechanix OS images will be based on Fedora, but Debian and other distros will continue to be offered under community-supported images.

The 'downs' in building hardware

Based on the request, here are some unfortunate behind-the-scenes things that have happened that have caused us some delay.

1. PCB Design vs Mechanical tug-of-war - When designing something like the Comet, where you are constrained on dimensions and have a strict form factor to achieve, every placement of a component on the PCB needs a sign-off from the mechanical team, and vice versa, where the mechanical team needs to understand routing constraints. Sometime in April, we had scheduled a full-day joint review, with close to 9 folks jammed in one room to try and get on the same page; even then, we had weeks of to-and-fro to try and get on the same page.
2. Part selection - Adding functionality is one thing, but finding the part that fits your design is another. In this new revision, we were committed to putting a bigger battery, which meant the power type-C would have to move to mid-mount style for some added room. Now it had to be USB 3.0 too. We scoured for at least 2 weeks to search for the right part and secure its availability. We'd have reviewed datasheets of close to 50-70 available designs to find the right one.
3. 1 mm = 5 days of delay - Towards the closure of the PCB design, when everything was good-to-go, I came back from my China trip with feedback from our parts manufacturer that the frame for the display needs 0.5 mm channels on both sides of the frame for glue to set in. This meant either we increased 1 mm in the width of the entire device, and by virtue - resize the PCB, or we decreased 1 mm from the housing, making it less durable. I'm sure you can guess what we did.
4. Teething issues in production - The Comet's PCB is a complex design, you have 10 layers in 1.2 mm thickness. Getting the right layer stackup (the arrangement of copper and insulation layers) is critical for things like signal integrity, low-impedence and power delivery in a design with multiple high-speed components. It took us a significant time to get this closed. Once the stackup got finalized, the EQs (engineering queries) started. We have ~3700 solder joints on the board, and it took us an entire week to answer all the production queries.
5. Supply Chain - The Comet's PCB has a total of 900 components to be soldered, out of which 191 are unique parts. You can't source them from a single supplier; we have 6 orders across distributors to complete the bill-of-materials. Even after our best attempts to optimise lead time, we are still waiting to receive 2/6 orders, one of them yet to be dispatched from Singapore, and the other is stuck at Indian customs for additional paperwork.

Delays are inevitable, we can only hope to learn from them and plan better next time 😇.