Project update 7 of 14
Video Out Now + Enclosure and PCB Status
by Stefan AThis week Jeff Geerling posted a video that covers Home Assistant Yellow! Check it out on YouTube!
We’ve already been busy in 2022 getting Yellow closer to production ramp-up.
At the end of 2021, our production partner made the surface finish on the plastic injection mold tooling. We’ve now received new enclosures, and this time they have the surface finish like the final version will have. The inside frosting looks really nice in my opinion!
We are currently working on improving some details of the enclosure: We had to add some plastic rims to improve the stiffness of the backplate. We are improving the design to make them look a bit more visually appealing. Also, the shrinking talked about in the last update is still something we need to improve.
On the electronics front we have been busy too: At the end of last year, we realized that we had to redesign the PoE circuitry. Our initial design was using the TI TPS23734, but the production schedule on TI’s side simply wasn’t matching our schedule. The new circuit now uses MPS’ MP8008, and we already secured the component for all orders. We also switched out some other parts with alternatives we were able to source and improved the built-in USB to UART circuit. We’ve now built and verified the first prototype with the new circuitry. The new PoE turned out to be even slightly more efficient! After verifying the new prototype, we tweaked the layout slightly and will produce 10 engineering samples through our manufacturing partner. We expect this to be the final layout so that we can go through the approval process soon. This redesign should not affect our delivery schedule as the timeline is driven by other components’ delivery times.
While we still haven’t received our order of e Silicon Labs MGM210P wireless module, we secured 500 to avoid delays in ramping up production. Besides the wireless module, we continue to make progress in securing parts for the volume production. With that, the risk that our production gets delayed is getting smaller. But there is still a chance that a missing or delayed component delivery could delay our production schedule. Fingers crossed.