Here we are, still reporting from home with this never ending covid-19 story, bringing some news on Helios64 production.
Manufacturing Status
While production is certainly progressing, we will only be able to start shipping end of July / early August. We apologize for this additional delay. It causes a lot of frustration to everyone, and increases the team stress level when you know you are making more and more people impatient.
It turned out we were too optimistic, partially because of the enthusiasm from the different Chinese factories which were obviously very eager to start work after the pandemic. They were themselves overly optimistics about how fast the China supply chain was going to resume. At the end we hit many bottlenecks here and there, and a lot of things remained painfully slow to manage remotely. Part of the blame is of course also on us because we did a bit of last minute changes and improvements on the product since it was delayed.
Demo Tour Video
To make you patient a little bit longer, we have prepared a little tour / demo video of Helios64. We hope it will make you excited about the product and give you confidence on the project delivery success !
Disclaimer : These are pre-production units, therefore some aspects are not as refined as the final production being currently manufactured (e.g the HDD trays in the video are just 3D printed and spray painted. The final HDD trays are being made via plastic injection). The board revision you will receive is the rev 1.2 that has some little fixes / improvements over the rev 1.1.
EMC Testing
The board will have the FCC and CE marking. We are ongoing ElectroMagnetic Compatibility (EMC) testing to verify Helios64 compliance with FCC and CE standards. Since Helios64 doesn’t deliberately transmit (the board doesn’t have any radio module), we are only required to do the following testing which are super straight forward :
- Verification of Conformity for FCC Standard :
- FCC CFR 47 PART 15 SUBPART B Section 15.101
- Declaration of Conformity for CE Standards :
- EN 55032:2015
- EN 61000-3-2:2014
- EN 61000-3-3:2013
- EN 55024:2010
We are performing our EMC test in the same facility than we did for Helios4 : UCS certification lab in South Korea.
Individual Item & Accessories
Previously we announced that all items (including the 2.5” HDD/SSD adapters) will be soon available to be ordered individually on our shop. The reason it hasn’t happened yet is that we are still waiting that all shipping carriers and routes get resumed and have their prices back to normal. The shipping cost surge due to covid-19 is finally coming down. By the end of this month, all carriers and routes will be back more or less to normal so we can estimate shipping fees correctly for all the individual items. Will keep you updated as soon as it’s ready.
Thanks again everyone for your constant support ;-)