We have life!
over 9 years ago – Thu, Dec 08, 2016 at 12:07:14 AM

Hey all,

Just wanted to share these pictures with you:

As you can see, everything is working nicely. We need to perform some more tests, but so far it is looking all good.

Battery Surround

Some of you may have seen the cases we have been rocking for PaPiRus, JustBoom and Pi PoE - well these came out of a recent partnership with the fantastic people over at CamdenBoss

CamdenBoss, among other things, are experts at casing and industrial design, including in injection moulding. After some discussions with them, it is looking likely that instead of a laser cut battery holder, we should have an injection moulded one - this should make it both better looking, more accurately produced and more durable...all great things. 

We do not want this to delay the project, and since we already have the laser cut design ready we will go with that if necessary. Hopefully we can rush a design through for the injection moulded one though as it should be the best option for the long term.

More updates coming soon.

Thanks,
Aaron and the PiJuice team.

Slight delay...
over 9 years ago – Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 11:34:26 PM

Hey all,

Just wanted to keep you in the loop. We had a slight delay with the PCBs so we are running about a week behind schedule in terms of getting the sample finished.

Hope to have something to show you and post about next week.

Glad to see all the positive feedback about the PiJuice solar panels and add ons arriving!

Thanks,
Team PiJuice

Mid-November Update
over 9 years ago – Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 03:09:18 PM

Dear backers, 

Our latest update is quite short, but we wanted to keep you in the loop on PiJuice progress.

Shipment of add-ons

As mentioned in the last update, some of you have already started receiving your pledge add-ons in the mail this week such as the PiJuice solar panels and other bits and pieces. 

We'll continue to keep shipping add-ons out over the coming weeks until we've completed this. 

We have already had some great feedback on the quality of the panels and the packaging and it's great to hear - keep it coming :-)

PiJuice Board Design

As mentioned in our previous update, our engineer has been working tirelessly to finish PiJuice. This week we've hit a milestone with a provisional BOM that will allow us to create some prototypes and carry out thorough testing before we make the final request to the manufacturer. 

We know you might get some feelings of déjà vu here, what with this being the third time, but we're confident that this time is lucky number three - we now have a team and a process we are confident in and we hope that is showing in our increased communication and update frequency.

Here are a couple renders of the new design:

 The logo, compliance logos, etc aren't shown here as we didn't bother adding them yet to speed up the ability to order samples PCBs. They should be with us next week (a few days behind schedule) along with the components.

The main changes are:

• Fixed all problems with design
• New "fuel gauge" battery level chip
• Upgraded power and battery connectors to handle the full voltages and power required (these were under specced on previous design)
• Tag connect programming headers added (for those of you interested, check out tag connect they are awesome!)
• Addition of charge level adjustment to open up to wider range of battery options
• Wider input voltage rating

Some of you probably thinking "uh oh scope creep" but most of these "improvements" are just implementations of features that were supposed to be in the previous design but missed, fixes of errors, or side effects of one of the other two reasons mentioned.

Next steps

The next update will present the outcome of the testing and hopefully move the project to its final stage. We hope this will be by the end of the month.

Meanwhile in the background we've been working on refining the plastic surround even further, sourcing batteries and creating proof of concept test rigs. Battery stock is all with our China manufacturer, headers are in the process of being ordered as we know these are good and everything is moving along nicely. Our new team member Francesco is overseeing and planning the set up guides and tutorial content as well.

If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below and we'll get back to them as soon as possible. 

All the best, 

The PiJuice Team

Add-on shipping commenced last week...
over 9 years ago – Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 09:52:35 PM

Hi all,

Just a quick one today to let you know that we have started shipping the PiJuice backer add-ons, as mentioned in our October update a few weeks ago (although we should have a progress update on the revised hardware designs towards the end of the week - after our progress meetings this Tuesday and Wednesday).

The first bag of add-ons went out last Thursday, and we have shipped more on Friday and today also. We will continue shipping add-ons in dribs and drabs - we could do it all in one go but we don't want it to distract from the core goal of finishing the module...which is of course the priority at the moment.

Here are a couple pictures from the shipping last Thursday:

If you ordered any add-ons, make sure to keep your eye out for the postman in the coming weeks!

As said - further update coming later this week so also keep your eye on your emails too.

Cheers,
Aaron and the Pi Supply team

Updated schedule info
over 9 years ago – Wed, Nov 02, 2016 at 03:22:13 PM

Dear Backers,

We promised in our last update that we would be discussing a more accurate schedule of the corrective/damage limitation work to the PiJuice in a future update, as soon as possible.

Progress

Our engineer has now had enough time to fully investigate and critique the existing work as well as verifying what can and can't be kept from the existing work. This initial capture of where we are was completed yesterday and we have now moved on to the corrected schematic/PCB.

Happily, this also means we now have a more accurate picture of what needs to be done to make the necessary corrections to the design which were identified by the above process (mainly due to badly implemented features - i.e. using battery voltage alone to determine charge level of battery rather than a more accurate "fuel gauge" IC):

• schematic/PCB corrections should take around two weeks to completely finish (14th Nov)

• after that, PCB for corrected prototype will be ordered and these are expected to arrive with us around the 18th Nov, and assembled and tested by the 25th Nov

• after this, assuming there are only small (or no) changes necessary to PCB/schematic after prototype testing, the corrected PCBs/BOM will be shared with the manufacturer again and production will then come out of hibernation....we will then work with our manufacturer to provide a more accurate estimate of production schedule and share this with you as soon as possible

Shipping of accessories

Shipping will commence next week on some of the accessories, as mentioned in our previous update. We will begin locking down the addresses this week, so if you have any accessories as part of your order (not all of them are included - see our last update for what will be shipping) then keep an eye on your emails if you need to update your address or change any other details. If you already know that you need to change your address you can do so from http://pijuice.backerkit.com

Thanks,
The PiJuice / Pi Supply team