Publishing all the Code, Production Updates, and More!

Since launch, it has been promised that all the firmware (code) for the PolyCast5 multi-tool remote will be open-source and accessible for anyone to learn from or use to customize their device. Today is that day!

The firmware repository is officially public on GitHub! This firmware has been in development nearly daily for over a year, so it's awesome that it can finally be publicized.

There's a lot to explore! It's crazy this all lives on one tiny ESP32-C5 MCU.

If you like what you see, feel free to leave a star to help boost the repository.

Big news here also! We've decided to invest in our own pick and place machine to manufacture PolyCast5 PCBs.

Basically how this works is it uses a vacuum pump, machine vision, and precise motor movements to pick up the tiny SMD components (resistors, capacitors, etc.) and place them on the circuit board autonomously. 

This is great because it will allow us to control production and quality in-house.

Above is an example PolyCast5 panel that will be used for production. Since the panels still aren't manufactured in-house, this is a good way to make many of them at scale being that it only requires one calibration on the PnP (pick and place machine) to produce six units. Additionally, it is faster (less cutting) for the same quality while needing less manual intervention. Pretty cool!

A minor hardware update has also been made to improve the battery health and longevity! A big issue with LiPo batteries in devices is that they slowly get worse over time. The main contributor to this is over-discharge of the battery.

While a PCM (protection circuit module) has been added to help, the battery still gets damaged slightly since it only activates at 2.8V. Now, the firmware turns itself off at 3.3V, which provides much better margins for the battery.

But this produces an interesting problem: how does the device turn back on after turning itself off? It's not like the device can set the enable pin high on itself.

This is the classic bootstrap problem. To solve it, some clever circuitry was added to re-enable the firmware so it can turn itself back on during boot (OR-gating the enable pin using a dual-channel diode). The takeaway here is that the device now turns off at 3.3V to give the battery plenty of margin and last longer, then it can re-enable itself when plugged in to charge just like before. 

The battery size itself was also increased from 1400mAh to 1500mAh for longer runtimes in addition to a deep sleep mode being added. 

Deep sleep makes it last a lot longer than regular (light) sleep, although it has to reboot when turned on. This said, it is ideal for when it may be sitting unused for a while but maybe isn't best for normal day-to-day use.

Shipping surveys will be sent out in a week or so, so be sure to keep an eye out in your inbox! You will need to fill it out so we know where to send your order.

If you haven't yet backed for a PolyCast5 multi-tool remote but are interested, you can still pledge late on the campaign, so check out the homepage and Kickstarter here. Some epic hardware expansions and other attachments are also in the works (and will be open-sourced entirely), so keep an eye out for those as well. (These connect to the external I2C GPIO pins.)

Thanks so much to everyone for supporting PolyCast5. A lot of exciting things on the way!