Production Manufacturing
We have made good progress evaluating potential contract manufacturers (CM). We are down to two. We feel both of them are very good, and are close to making a final decision. Key things we have considered are the CM as a trustworthy partner, quality commitment, cost, design capabilities, predictability to get us to market. As stated in the last blog, part supply remains difficult. We plan to work with our CM to evaluate options that might allow us to manufacture sooner and/or improve our product.
Dev Kit Update
We are close to being ready to package and ship the Dev Kits. We have all but one part with our assembler partner. The main daughter board, the SJ201, had about a 30% failure rate in test. This is highly unusual; in the past we had about a 1% failure rate. We have sent the boards back to the manufacturer to troubleshoot and fix. We will also work with the manufacturer on root cause analysis. We are expecting we will have this resolved in the next 2 weeks, and be able to ship the Dev Kits in the mid July timeframe. Note, we will be using our new CM for the production of future SJ201s. Thank you Dev Kit enthusiasts for your patience!
Software
We’ve published the Homescreen and Camera Skills to the Marketplace so these will appear automatically on devices if you have auto-updates enabled.
The new Homescreen Skill looks a lot like the previous homescreen at first, however giving the Homescreen it’s own dedicated Skill makes it easier to pull in a diverse range of content. For you, this means the default view is no longer limited to only time and date information.
With this initial release, you can change the look of your Mark II Homescreen by voice, “Hey Mycroft, change the wallpaper”. We’re also adding the current weather at the top of your screen to give a quick view of the general conditions and temperature at a glance. The time is also much bolder to make it easier to see from across the room. This is what’s available right now, however more importantly the Homescreen Skill creates a foundation for extra features coming in the near future.
To celebrate the release of the Homescreen Skill, we’d love to add in more default wallpapers from the community. Add your ideas in the Forum.
In other news this month we’ve been fixing bugs and improving the core Skills as well as a major release of mycroft-core. All of this brings:
- A long list of improvements to the TTS service and particularly its caching mechanism.
- The shutdown bug that would cause the Mark II to reboot has been finally squashed.
- Improvements to Adapt provide a more consistent experience for keyword based intent matching.
- Support for Farsi added to Lingua Franca, our multilingual parsing and formatting library.
- Updates to a range of default Skills like – Timer, Pairing, Common Query, and Pairing.
Duane joined Mycroft March 2021. He has extensive experience in program management, IT, manufacturing, and as an entrepreneur. He is an enthusiast for skiing, playing guitar, music, biking, innovation, reading, learning, and good comedy (alright, even bad humour!). He is a believer, and excited about Mycroft, our staff, our product, our vision, our community, and our customers! Let’s all make it happen – great product by good people for good people.