Summary

Hello all, here’s a brief summary to update you on what we’ve been busy doing to complete the release to TREG users.

We’ve been tracking down an elusive detail, that has bedeviled us for several days, and we think we’ve cracked it. An intermittent anomaly could cause some letters to be swapped or dropped on some units. Operation of certain keys could be momentarily compromised, and then they’d type normally again. Aside from this perplexing and sporadic anomaly, the typing has otherwise been very smooth and fast.

The issue would come and go, and could later affect units that didn’t manifest it during regular QA testing. We had to fully understand the cause of these intermittent outages, and fix it to ensure reliable, continuous service.

After reviewing our test data in detail this weekend and tonight, through much software diagnostics and lab work, we now have definitive evidence of the cause. It was due to properties of the physical structure, and not firmware. The science behind the root cause is a subtle and curious area of Physics, which presented here because of the novel architecture intrinsic to this new multitouch key technology.

Tonight we’ve been testing an alternative layering arrangement for the laminate materials that appears to successfully eliminate the effect. We’re going to confirm that this method fully cures it without any side effects, and then we’ll update all the TREG hardware units to incorporate the fix, and move forward with release. The other firmware and hardware performance parameters have been testing favorably.

We’ll post some more tech details after we’ve confirmed our results, but as the team finished their work minutes ago this evening, the word that universally came to mind was -

Eureka!