2013-05-19 12:55:44
All the Svethlanas are now tested, only three out of a hundred didn't work. No more Supervidels have been tested because the last two months have been spent on fixing bugs in the firmware and drivers. We have started and stopped shipping of boards a few times now, because of unforeseen problems. Right now we have stopped shipping again because the supervidel updating procedure was not failsafe enough and we need to add more checks to the updating software regarding ABE version and such.
2013-03-25 21:21:13
We received the 8 boards from the manufacturer and only then did we discover that another small connector was missing on all those boards...
In the mean time we have started testing all the other SV boards together with Svethlanas. About 40 SV and 65 Svethlanas have been tested. One Svethlana and a few more SV have not worked. Some of the SV boards have visible defects which we can fix.
We have started packing some shipments but have not shipped them because we are currently waiting for new drivers from Pep and we need to fix some bugs ourselves.
2013-03-03 20:09:07
After extra delays at the manufacturer without any reason we have finally got all the SV boards. We have started testing them, but this will take a while (several weeks). There were also 8 boards that have not got the DVI connector and one other connector mounted, so we will have to return them or fix them ourselves. Sigh...
2013-01-24 20:38:38
The four prototypes of the SV all worked fine so we told the manufacturer to go ahead and produce the remaining boards. They are almost done now, but the pick and place machine ran out of one or two components which they now are waiting for before they can finish.
Meanwhile we have started testing the Svethlanas and 1/3 are now tested. 100% work so far.
Quite a few people who did not prepay for this batch have emailed us asking if they can buy a board. We will set up a small webshop on our webpage "soon" where you can reserve one (1) board per person. We set this limit since there will only be about 17 boards left over when all prepaid ones are sent. You must pay within a few days after reserving a board, otherwise the reservation is cancelled. Payment details have not been decided yet.
2012-12-31 16:26:06
Some good news: :)
So far the first SV rev2 prototype that we have tested has worked 100%. We are now using it daily, with full DVI and VGA functionality, which also proves that the DDR2 memory system works fine too. We had replaced the old DDR2-667 chips with DDR2-800 chips because of cost and availability, so that was a bit scary before testing. The DDR2 RAM is still only run at 185MHz (DDR370) because of FPGA limitations. We might be able to go up a few MHz later though.
One of the new Svethlanas is being used for networking, and that works fine too with its new 45-pin FPC cable and connector. This replaced the old 1.27mm pitch connector and cable because of the cost of the cable.
The new motherboard clock connector on the SV rev2 has been tested by feeding the 25.175MHz VGA clock from the soldering points just right of the large motherboard capacitor, and then verified that the SV rev2 chooses that clock for VGA Videl resolutions.
So right now it seems very likely that we can tell the manufacturer to go on and make the remaining SV rev 2 boards on January 7th when they start again.
Happy New Year! :)
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