Batteries sourced and ordered
about 10 years ago – Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 10:23:56 PM

Hi all,

Just a quick update with some good news for you - we have yesterday managed to secure an order for 2900 units of the 1820mAh BP7X battery! This means that all Kickstarter backers will receive one of these higher capacity batteries. These are brand new, clearance stock of the original Motorola batteries. (see previous update for a comparison of batteries).

We may also have found a longer-term source for these BP7X batteries, however at present, due to the pricing and availablity, it is looking like we will only be able to offer the 1400mAh BP6X as standard for the post-KS orders. We are still negotiating with the supplier to see if there is anything we can do here. But at the very least we will still be able to offer the originallly promised 1400 mAh which is nice after the scare we had with our previous battery supplier!

We have also worked out a price on the 2300mAh batteries - and these should come in at around £15 retail. It was not feasible to offer these as standard but they will come as an optional extra.

Thanks,
Aaron and the Pi Supply team

More battery pictures...
about 10 years ago – Fri, Jan 08, 2016 at 09:32:26 PM

Dear backers,

We have today received samples of the official Motorola BP7X  and a couple of people were asking for more info and clarification on the batteries so we have taken some more pictures for you to clear things up:

 Hopefully these pictures more clearly show the size difference in the batteries. Between the two Motorola official batteries there is only a difference of around 1mm. The 2300mAh is significantly large but still fits perfectly in the PiJuice.

We can confirm that all three batteries work with add on boards on top of the PiJuice, however with the 2300mAh if you have a board which has lots of electronics on the underside you may need to use another header as an extension piece between the PiJuice and the board on top.

Hope that clarifies things a little bit.

Thanks,
Aaron and the Pi Supply team

Good news, bad news
about 10 years ago – Thu, Jan 07, 2016 at 11:31:08 PM

Hi all,

We will start with the bad news and then move on to the good. The great thing is we are still making progress on all fronts and are hoping to be starting production pretty soon as all the tests have proven that the new design is very good and working well.

CE/FCC/IC Testing

We have had a development in the CE testing which was going to occur tomorrow...we were squeezing into a gap in their schedule which has now, unfortunately, closed unavoidably. This is a shame, but it should only be a small setback.

What we are going to do is take the sample up to them (they are only about 1.5 hours drive from our warehouse) and leave it with them with all the accessories and ancilliary parts they need in order to perform all the tests. They will then squeeze in the tests on PiJuice around their other jobs every day when there is any down time - doing as many as they can each day until they finish them all.

All testing will definitely be finished by the 22nd January now, but hopefully sooner (it depends on time taken for other clients tests as well as any potential cancellations etc etc). We are still on track to start production as soon as the CE/FCC/IC approval comes through.

And now for the good news.....

Battery update

A week ago we posted an update saying we would unfortunately have to downgrade the battery to a 1230mAh battery. This was a major blow to both ourselves and you the backers and it was a really bad update to have to deliver at this stage.

The good news is that there is a silver lining to that cloud! After that update we received a flood of updates and suggestions from backers suggesting potential different battery models, suppliers and manufacturers...and this has led to something great. A special mention here goes to Thomas William Pleasance, Mark Richardson and Diego Zuccato for their suggestions of battery types and suppliers.

Essentially we have found a few things - firstly we have found a reliable long term source of quality 1300mAh BP6X batteries...and also a number or suppliers with significant quantities of end-of-line clearance stock of official 1390mAh motorola batteries. The standard product is hopefuly going to ship going forward with a 1300+ mAh battery (which depending on stock availability may actually be 1390mAh).

Additionally we have found a source for a drop-in replacement battery that is a 2300mAh battery. We are currently enquiring about pricing and availability on this battery. It is not likely that it will be possible to ship this battery as standard with the PiJuice due to the high price (and it is a bit bulky anyway) but it will be sold further down the line as an optional upgrade.

Last, but definitely not least - we have found also a source for the original Motorola BP7X battery which is an 1820mAh drop in replacement for the BP6X. It is slightly less bulky than the 2300 mAh one mentioned above (about half as thick) and a little bit more so than the BP6X. These are end of line stock so are coming in at a decent price also. The supplier has said they think they will have around 3000 units of these batteries that they can sell to us. We are just verifying all the costs, shipping and logistics of getting our hands on these but we are thinking it would be nice to ship all Kickstarter backers an 1820mAh battery as a standard upgrade (and a thank you for backing this KS campaign and waiting so patiently).

If we can get our hands on more of these 1820mAh batteries it will probably become the standard battery for the PiJuice, however if we can't we will revert to the 1300mAh battery. The good thing is it looks like we will hopefully be able to offer this BP7X battery to all Kickstarter backers.

At this stage, we can't promise that you will all be getting an 1820mAh battery - we do not want to promise that until we have the batteries in our possession. But it is looking very likely and we will update you as soon as we have confirmation on this :-)

We hope this comes as good news - and thanks for all your suggestions and support on helping make this happen!

All the best,
Aaron and the Pi Supply team

Update, battery problem and happy holidays!
over 10 years ago – Wed, Dec 30, 2015 at 11:27:27 PM

Dear Backers,

We just wanted to let you know that we have tested and verified the design for PiJuice v2.2 and we will be proceeding with this design as it is working very well so far. We are just compiling a final BOM, PCB production files and instructions for the manufacturer in order for them to provide us with a full quote for the production run.

We have got this design booked in for a re-test of the FCC, CE, IC, C-Tick stuff which will commence on the 8th Jan 2016 and will finish the following Monday. We hope this should be a pretty painless experience again as the design is actually simpler than the previous one and uses less components.

As soon as this is passed, we are then ready to start manufacture and are now gearing up to try and get the wheels in motion for manufacture in the next couple of weeks!

Battery problem

The original Motorola BP6X battery was 1400mAh and this is what we advertised in the Kickstarter campaign. Unfortunately we have had trouble sourcing "official" batteries because these are end of line from Motorola...they are however readily available on the spares market from OEMs and it has always been our plan to buy a good quality OEM battery rather than an official Motorola one.

However, due to the end of line nature of these batteries  we can currently find no reputable replacement battery suppliers/manufacturers producing batteries to the 1400mAh level - the maximu being around 1230mAh. We have discussed with the manufacturers of these 1230mAh units about producing larger batteries of 1400 to 1500+mAh in the same shell, and they have said it is definitely possible but that we would be looking at minimum order quantities of these batteries of around 25,000 units - which unfortunately is just not possible at the moment as it is a huge investment!

Unless we find an alternative supplier that can deliver good quality batteries to the 1400mAh spec it is therefore looking likely that to avoid any futher delays we will be shipping with a 1230mAh battery.

We appreciate this is not what you want to hear, but unfortunately our hands are tied on this matter at the moment. If we can do 1400+ mAh we will do!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We just wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you for all your support in 2015. We have unfortunately experienced some long delays on this project and it has been great to have such an enthusiastic group of backers behind us. We know you can't wait to get these into your hands, and we can't wait to start shipping either so we will be doing all we can to expedite the manufacture process.

In any case, we hope you all had a great Christmas (if you celebrate) and we wish you all a Happy New Year - here's to 2016!

Thanks for your support,
Aaron and the Pi Supply team

Forgot to say...website migration
over 10 years ago – Wed, Dec 02, 2015 at 11:38:45 PM

Hi all,

Just a small nugget of information we forgot to include in the last update. The more eagle eyed of you will notice that the previous website PiJuice.com has now been deprecated and we have moved all of the content that was residing there over to Pi-supply.com instead.

The decision to do this was to make it much easier both for our customers and for ourselves to have one central hub for all things related to PiJuice moving forward and to reduce the maintenance overhead on having two separate websites and free up our time for other more important things.

If you, or anyone you know, placed a pre-order at PiJuice.com you have nothing to worry about. All of the orders are still in place and recorded on our order management system.

Additionally, all of the PiJuice projects will also in time be listed on the Pi Supply Maker Zone - pi-supply.com/make 

Thanks,
Aaron and the Pi Supply team