We had an unexpected setback in the production process. The STEM Base, in its current configuration, failed testing for FCC/CE regulatory standards for a consumer product. While unfortunate, this is an issue that is completely resolvable. The reason the Base is failing is specifically due to our design of housing the five radio frequency (RF) dongles inside the Base. The RF dongles require grounding, but this grounding interferes with the electromagnetics (EM) of the tracking.
To address this issue we redesigned the Base electronics to keep the RF dongles located internally but not conflicting with the EM. This will require the production of new Base PCBs and further testing to ensure everything is working properly.
If the redesigned Base passes the FCC/CE testing in April, and meets our performance requirements, we will be ready to start shipping systems in July.
If the reconfigured Base does not pass the FCC/CE compliance testing, we will be removing the dongles from the Base and positioning them externally. In this case, each Controller and/or Pack will require its own USB dongle, for which we will be providing a hub. If this configuration is what we need in order to pass the testing and, again, meet our performance requirements, we will be looking at shipping in September.
As mentioned in our previous update, we are currently building and shipping hand-assembled pre-production prototypes as quickly as we can. This process was also affected by the Base electronics redesign, but we expect to have them all shipped in the month of April.
And, for an update on the software, we had our first demos of our Unreal Engine 4 integration with the Sixense VR SDK and the STEM System at a couple of very successful events this month.
Submitted March 31, 2015 at 02:51PM by TheSonicRetard http://ift.tt/1BJGQ0M
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