PolyCast5 Shipping Update! | What's Happening and What's Next

Big news here! PolyCast5 is in full production and units are being pumped out as fast as possible. As mentioned in the previous update, production is being done in-house for end-to-end quality control.

In this update you can check out the current production status, unit testing, and see some of what goes into producing a multi-tool remote.

To jump in, ~20% of orders will ship this/early next week, with the rest following in batches. This 20% will consist mostly of U.S. orders with white casings, since the bulk purchase of transparent casings are still on the way. 

All the PCB panels have arrived and are ready for assembly, the final version 14 hardware!

All the needed integrated circuit stock has also been secured, which is great since many of the ICs that PolyCast5 uses are pretty cutting edge and often sell out leading to long lead times. Since everything that is needed has already been ordered and is being actively assembled into devices, this was a good dodge!

The rest of the bulk purchase of 1500mAh LiPo batteries (an upgrade from the original 1400mAh for longer battery life) are estimated to arrive in a few weeks. They were ordered in early August, but our supplier needs some extra time to get them fabricated and shipped (there are also additional restrictions on importing batteries). We'll do our best to get everything ready for them now so we can continue shipping in batches as soon as they get here.

If you didn't know, we also make all the buttons in-house since these were ironically one of the most challenging thing to purchase at scale (in the right color). This is done by resin printing them, cleaning, curing, sanding, then finally spraying/matting. Pretty cool, and they work great!

PolyCast5 now has its very own testing apparatus to ensure everything is working in tip-top shape before being pushed out the door.

This is pretty cool, since it basically works by probing all the various chips on the board then requesting a response. If the response succeeds, the chip is connected and communicating. After that, it then asks the connected chip to probe all of its own pins and check for the correct initial states.

This is super important for identifying issues like solder bridges, shorts, or missing paste, which would be fatal if not caught.

If any issues are identified, the component gets manually reworked then re-tested. Then the process gets repeated until all checks pass.

As an interesting side quest, all of the stock of ESP32-C5 microcontrollers that were ordered had a different eFuse revision than the previous units used in the prototypes.

This is usually fine, except that this revision had a silicon errata that would lead to PSRAM corruption when encrypted. Don't worry, a workaround was figured out and tested rigorously so everything still works exactly like it should - but it was a tough bit of troubleshooting since it needed to work on every existing unit of stock.

As always, even more optimizations have been made since the last update even though we are on the final v14 hardware. For one, the flash memory space of the remote has been increased by 20%!

This is great, since it basically means it will be able to have 20% more features in future firmware updates. This optimization was made by procedurally generating one of the homescreen animations, which has a much smaller footprint than the raw RGB image values. Interestingly, I think the matrix rain animation honestly looks even better now (higher frame rate, colors, randomization) while also freeing up a lot of memory.

Other improvements have also been made, such as making the AI keyboard voice recognition much more snappy and adding increased protection to the encrypted ESP-NOW setup. This allows it to not only hide the data being sent but also authenticate it, which is important protection for maintaining complete device integrity. The tutorial examples have also been updated to account for this improved security.

Also in the works are some awesome hardware expansion modules which will be open-sourced in their entirety (schematics, code, production files, etc.) so you can get super imaginative with everything you want this device to be able to do.

Lots of good stuff!

Your patience is highly appreciated as batches continue being made, assembled, tested, and boxed. I can promise you that we truly are putting everything we have into getting these devices out the door while retaining the high quality that is expected. A lot goes into every unit.

Now I'd better get back to it! Thanks for being here - this wouldn't be possible without your support.