On Wednesday I went to inspect the first production parts of the housing. I got a chance to take a few pictures of the production mold (see photo above). It's quite interesting to see how injection molded parts are made. The top and bottom of the picture show the housing bottom and top imprints on one side of the mold and the center circle is the feeding tube for the ABS plastic.
The manufacturer made about 25 sample parts for me to inspect and it looks like the housings came out very well. A few minor touch-ups on the mold itself are needed to perfect things a bit, but overall the parts already look very good (see picture below; you can click on it to zoom in a bit; due to the lighting condition of the photo, the zoom-in looks a little grainy). The eventual parts will be a matt over-all finish with a shiny imprint of the logos, just like the back of your iPhone.
I took five iGPS360 module boards with me to make sure all of them would fit the housings. Guess what.... all of them fit in perfectly so luckily no changes are required for PCB placement. I guess the time on housing design was well spent!
What else has been going on?
I have been working on getting the online shopping cart ready so you will be able to place your order pretty soon. You will be able to make payment through PayPal either with a PayPal account, or if you don't have a PayPal account, the PayPal site will give you the option to directly pay with your credit/debit card.
Regarding the iGPS360 module itself, the GPS engines are shipping next week and the tuned antennas the week thereafter. The PCB boards are expected back September 23 after which I will do verification testing before committing them to the reflow process which is scheduled for September 25. The assembled boards are expected back on October 8 so no change in ETA :)
Want an
module?
Wish to become a distributor of the iGPS360 module?
Please send us an email at distributors@orangegadgets.com
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Housing mold and first production parts
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23 comments:
WOOHOO!
Now all I have to do is get a job again :p
I can't wait to place my order!
I want to place my order
N O W ! ! ! ! ! ! !
Now now now now now now now now
Looking so forward to this. Thanks a lot man.
Great news!
By the way, is there anything new about the software?
w00t!!!! I am looking forward to placing my order.
right... i will be right here waiting to place the order..
definitely need to get a better job...
Will the software be able to be used with different baud rates?
You should post a guide of how to use it with the iPod/iPhone on different software levels (2.01,2.02,2.1ect) and what software to use with it. Slot more people would buy one because they would be confident they would know how to use it. My 2 cents.
true... i am definitely getting one.. unfortunately i don't know which software goes with it well..
I have upgraded my ipod touch with 2.1, although i have not jailbroken it yet.. but will do so when I receive the GPS unit..
me too.
I would like to use it like the youtube clip that use the xGPS software, but how?!
xgps runs at 19200, what baud rate do these gps's run at.
Any way for you to make a non-branded version? I would love to buy this, but without all of the branding.
@anonymous: regarding software, right now the xGPS software looks very promising (although it is unclear how they are going to implement directions without internet connection as they are using Google maptiles).
@happyjam64: standard baudrate is set at 115200 at 5Hz(!) NMEA refresh rate, but baudrate is user changeable. I am working on a utility that will allow you to change it to a different rate, e.g. 19200 for the xGPS application (a max refresh rate of 3Hz is feasible at this low baudrate). For all the videos on the blog with this xGPS software, the module in use was actually set to that 19200 baudrate.
@james: instructions for software setup and module setup will follow once I have some more time. It really is all not that complicated.
@g-man: the xGPS software is very easy to setup up (see the xgps.xwaves.net website). Just add their repository in Cydia and install xGPS from there.
@anonymous: by non-branded version, you mean you don't want any logos on the casing? This is part of the mold and can not be changed. But if you really want a custom casing, that can be done but it is very expensive for single units (as they need to be individually CNC machined). Or you could polish the casing down to where the logos are no longer visible (about 200um). Maybe I'll polish one down for you by hand to see if that works :)
I just CAN'T wait to place my order. :)
Until now I've been able to attract 3 more people to this GPS solution for the 2.5G iPhone. With my 2 mines that will be a count of 5 :P
I've made a round trip to see whant I can do for the sofware and until now it's only xGPS. There's no "easy" way to get the maps offline except for xGPS.
I'm working on a french how-to for those dummies who happen to surrounds me :P
I should be able to get it in englmish as well if there is enought people interrested.
Best regards,
Alban.
great! Waiting for news, price and opening orders day!!
Just stumbled over this project/product and it looks very interesting. As previously mentioned in this thread, it would be very cool if you could update your faq with a bit of info on which hardware/software combinations this works with. (For example the new touch with newest firmware?) as well as how we can program against it in our own programs. Just a little appetizer to see if what one have in mind can be realised.. then I would instantly place a preorder =)
@Alban - I would love to get my hands on a copy of your English how-to manual.. it will greatly help me..
@Ian : Will post a link here once this will be done. :)
Expect this by the weekend.
@alban: another good solution for maps offline is JasonKit with GMDL (available through BiggBoss)
@fabrizio: the price is listed here and the online store should be up soon.
@anonymous: the new touch is not jailbroken yet and a such you can't use it yet with the module. Regarding using the module with your own software, you can directly read the NMEA data from the serial port. I hope to have some tutorials available in the near future as well.
I could prepare a tutorial for you if you wish.. still waiting to order my receivers :-)
Nice! Would like to buy one.
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