A new version of ZeroPhone is being in-field tested right now, and the batch of 20 ZeroPhones is almost built - I'll be testing it now.

Boards in stacks of 5. I ran out of some passives to finish the boards in the bottom left corner, but I'll have them tomorrow.

The boards pictured are already checked visually, no visible soldering bridges or misplaced components (there were a lot of those). Now they just need some THT stuff attached - that will need lots of human intervention, but I've found some people that can help with it, tomorrow and the day after =) Also, hey, at least I seem to have all the THT parts I need and don't need to run around sourcing them.

We won $1000 in Hackaday Prize! That was really unexpected, I mean, we aren't even IoT - though I do have some really cool IoT-related features in my mind =) I think that this is going to be an awesome opportunity to upgrade the tools I've been using for ZeroPhone assembly - so that less time is wasted the next time I'll be building a batch of ZeroPhones. For a start, I'll upgrade the pick&place and the "reflow" oven I've used - it's never been intended to be used for PCB reflow, so it can't do thermal profiles or anything like that, and you need to supervise it to turn it off at the right time. Then, I'll also make a small stash of spare components, from those that are the hardest to get here - like, some reels of passives that local shops no longer have (because I've bought them all and they don't want to order new reels yet), displays and GSM modules and whatever has shown to be harder to get than anticipated. Having some spare components is also great for helping out other ZeroPhone users - if somebody somewhere has a broken component, I can ship out a new one on a short notice!

There's a need for an FAQ of the project, for a project roadmap document, and for a document that'd serve as a list of contribution priorities. I'm slowly drafting something here (for the software part, but there'll also be at least the "hardware" part), and this is the document that, I hope, will work for all three of those needs.



This month was busy. I've spent a lot of time trying to make the Pick&Place work, and I haven't succeeded with that in the end, so I had to pick&place all the components myself. Then, I ran into sourcing issues, some decisions that I needed to make on the spot, some more random tools I needed to get... Sufficient to say, all the bad decisions I've made and the problems I've encountered do deserve a separate worklog, and I hope that things I've learned this month will help me make better decisions in the future.

As for now - as soon as I finally ship the prototypes, I'll work on estimating the financial part of the project, no doubt, the most important part when it comes to crowdfunding, so it has to be done first in order to understand how I can price it realistically, what I can offer, what are the changes I'll need to make and what are the possible problems I'll encounter.

Next thing to cover this week - current state of hardware. Cheers!