ORWL units headed for certification

First Units Shipping Next Week!

We are finally confident that we will ship the first ORWL units sometime this coming week! The delay has been due to several issues with the key fob. We have one more key fob problem to stamp out and with the secure element vendor to find a solution. We and our partners have been working around the clock and all weekend and we’re determined to get this done!

The first units are extras we set aside from the batch sent for certification testing. These extras will ship to customers who are not bound by FCC and CE compliance requirements. See the end of this update for more details on the availability of these first units and on regulatory compliance progress.

Source Code Available!

We’ve shared on GitHub the source code for two critical pieces of the system! ORWL BLE code and key fob NFC code are both at a reasonable state of maturity and ready for broader review. Please note that this code is best described as beta-level at the moment. We know that many people are keenly interested in this, and we are still committed to seeing this through as an open project that will benefit from full audit and involvement from the community at large, and we’re excited to finally be able to share! Of course, more code will be released as we complete testing - we’ll announce it as it comes.

Regulatory Certification

We have had seven units at the regulatory compliance lab for a couple of weeks already. They have come back to Quanta, our ODM, for rework, and they are heading back to the lab today. This is for basic EMC and RF compliance for FCC and CE certification, and it’s going well. We expect about five more weeks to complete the process, including report drafting and receipt of an official FCC grant. In the meantime, the FCC allows us to share our own test units with customers for evaluation purposes.

If you feel like you absolutely cannot wait another five weeks in order to review what ORWL does, please get in touch and we will arrange a pre-certification unit for review in the coming few weeks. These would be loaner units and replaced with actual certified units as soon as they are ready. We expect the final, certified units to be identical to the loaner units. Please note these official terms from the FCC: these devices have not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. They are not, and may not be, offered for sale or leased, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained.

Thank you all for hanging in there! We apologize for the recent silence - we’ll strive to keep you better informed from now on. Here we go!