Alright everyone, time for another update!
First thing's first, the tester units are done and are going out this week. Expect feedback from the testers within 2 weeks in #testers-corner on the Discord. I will ask some of them to post here as well.
Second thing is the release date. The short answer is that they will be for sale before the end of September. Long answer below.
All tweaks to the shell have been finished and tested, and I'm printing them as fast as my little printers can go. I have a good workflow in place now, with a timed UV oven, IPA bath agitator and an air compressor for post-clean drying. An knife and 600 grit sandpaper gets the supports removed nice and cleanly.
List of shell tweaks since V17:
- Cap has better fitment and has a tactile bump when seating.
- Jig strength has been improved and it has been made symmetrical, bridging pins 2 and 9. After hundreds of unseat/reseat cycles I have yet to have it fail to put the console into RCM.
- Tactile bump when seating jig has been improved.
- Press-fit M1 nuts and M1x2.5 screws hold the board in place. Board now locates perfectly in the shell, build quality feels significantly higher.
- Cleaned up the design a lot and optimized for machining in preparation for possible injection molding in the future.
Output quality is consistent and I don't think I can improve the shells any further. Very happy with them.
In case you missed it, PCB tweaks since V17:
- Mounting hole diameter changed for better fitment.
- Button changed from physical to capacitive, feels and works much better.
- Moved hall effect reset switch out of the way above MCU.
- Greatly reduced amount of vias and made lots of circuit board trace optimizations.
- Improved battery negative terminal with embedded DI logo.
I don't think I can improve the PCBs any more either. Very happy with these too.
Now, the long answer regarding the release date is that PCBWay screwed up the boards, putting some resistors and capacitors in the wrong place. There are a few reasons they did this, but I got a 28% partial refund out of it, and it won't happen for the next batch. However, this means I need to manually rework all the boards myself. I'm about 20% done reworking them and based on the amount of time that's taken, all boards should be fully reworked on or before September 22nd. The shipment will be for 500 units, as I want to keep some extras around and have some allowance for some mess-ups during repairs without stressing about it. Repairing over 500 boards by hand under a microscope is stressful enough.
All DIs, whether reworked or not, are fully tested by me. This includes jig used during injection, all LEDs, the capacitive button, battery level input, USB, fitment to both a new and fairly used game card slot and a microscope inspection for soldering quality. It does take a while, but I'm not interesting in shipping something of subpar quality.
That's all I have for you for now, thank you so much for sticking around and I can't wait to see how the testers feel about the DragonInjector.