January 2018 Update

Hello all,

Thank you for your continuous support and trust on this project. It's been very difficult recently for us - the cost continuously rise over past weeks, and we also need to keep our business going to support it. It was hard, but a lot of you gave us great support and encouragement to keep it moving, we can't thank you enough.
Current Status

We have most components on the way, or delivered now. There are some ICs has been discontinued, but we did find the successor parts and placed the order.

Memory chips are quite expensive but we still managed to place the order to cover 3K production with both 1.5K volumes.

PCB delivery is the most difficult part recently. Due to the recent factors, such as local government restricting emitting chemical waste, the factory has to reduce capacity of production, we've paid deposit for an express service and the target delivery of plain PCB will be around Mid-February, around 12th.

When the plain PCB arrives, we will provide you the detailed pictures.
The Next Step

Once we have the PCB, we will start SMT immediately. Due to the Chinese New Year in Mid-February, labour in a week before and 2 weeks afterwards is very unstable. Our conservative estimation it can be done around 5th March till the Mid. We will provide you fully populated pictures at this point.

The final assembly estimates to start between 10th Mar to 15th Mar, and we will use samples from here for testing software and for CE and FCC certifications. It will take about 2 weeks before shipping them to you.

Therefore the first shipping date will be around end of March, by quickest. It sounds far away, but we did not want to disappoint you again for the potential factors that may delay the progress, therefore we did the estimation date conservatively. Hopefully that can be achieved quicker than estimation.
Risks that might change delivery

Mainly the Chinese New Year's holiday. Some labours may leave a week before the New Year's Day, and some may come back one week after holiday finishes (Official holiday period is a week). With reduced number of labours before and after the New Year's Holiday, there is still uncertainty on SMT and Assembly.
Special Thanks

Livermorium and Liangchen Chen has helped Youyota greatly this time on moving the project forward. With this support we have more confident on this delivery schedule. Livermorium's first product has just been announced by Lenovo and Motorola last week at CES 2018.
The Next Update

We will keep you closely updated with the process of components, PCB and assembly. The next update will be around 10 Feb, when we will have our plain PCB ready for SMT. And we will post pictures with the process.