Im not affiliated with DT and likely not relevant to make these statements.
Prototyping is hard. There are an outrageous amount of uncontrollable factors that come in to play with prototyping. And even when you get a viable prototype, something always comes up.
In this case you have 4 major components coming together. The two chips, an LED, and the tuned antenna.
It isnt as simple as just throwing another chip in line. The tuning of the antenna is dependant upon the combined capacitence of the devices connected to it.
So say an Antenna to be tuned at 13.56mhz for the NFC Type 2 chip needs to have 32 turns of .001mm gauge wire around a ferrite rod. This resonantes perfectly. Adding the led may be nominal, but adding another chip in itself will add additional capacetence to the circuit. Which now throws off the resonant frequency of the antenna.
new calculations have to be made to find the correct inductance that will match to the combined capacetence of all the components in line.
So say you now have determined you need 48 turns of .001mm wire around a ferrite rod to perfectly couple with 2 chips and the LED.
Are you personally wrapping each antenna, micro-soldering each chip, and then encasing the chips in bioglass and sealing them? Of course not, now you have a production assembly house doing this.
So say you order a batch of 100 made to your specification. it takes them 2 weeks to setup the tooling, a week to send out samples. you get the samples in and half are good, half are bad. 50% yield is horrible. Something in the process is wrong. Now you have to start checking each component. Is it the Antenna winding, the ferrite core, bad batch of chips? was the LED soldered in backwards. You trace the bad component, initiate stricter QC, and do another batch. 3 weeks to setup tooling, 1 week to ship, 1 week to test. At this point with two runs likely 3 months have gone by.
QC is HARD. like incredibly hard. Ive been at this a year and most of my time is spent QC’ing.
The PM3 Midboards would have been released early January if it wasnt for poor QC. I could have released a very inferior product due to something like this:
Does it affect the performance… no. does it look bad on you for allowing something like this out? Absolutely.
Amal is working on a much stricter set of QC. There are real concerns around sterility, biofouling, and potientially having his products in someone that is not functional.
I like the DT products i have because they work. If it means waiting longer to maintain the same level of quality i am fine with that. I know you dont want to come off snarky, but there are a lot of moving parts that come together to make the NextV2. any one of those parts can be the lynch pin. However i am confident when it is released, its going to be perfect to the community’s standards as i believe Amal’s standards are even higher.
