Notices

What is worse? You "wasting" 10 minutes answering a valid concern or us wasting two years waiting for a product that was supposed to be delivered in Q4 2015?

Hey @pichlo, schedules do change and I am satisfied that changes and delays are explained.
And think of it this way; as it is a small design team actually working on the product, the longer it takes the more complete and error-free the end product will be when it finally emerges.
It's not like SW you know; when the boards are ordered it is a bit late to correct bugs! (well, barring simple changes that can be done on the top layer)

@juiceme, one man's "explained delay" is another man's "excuse".
I am not arguing one way or another, just pleading with joerg_rw to try to see things in a perspective. I hope you understand that the language in the post #2840 sounds rather belligerent given the circumstances. People have asked a valid question. All that @enso did was to try to lighten it up a bit.

@pichlo: one man's "lighten it up" is another man's "antagonizing annoyance" particularly when the content isn't exactly improving the mood of anybody or providing any info, and 3 posts from same author in sequence (with several deleted onces in between) is not exactly considered good style either particularly when you're moderator of a thread where that happens.
Please note that my post referred to the gif posts only and NOT to any concern - others gave a perfect answer already, many thanks for that. I can assure you threre's nobody more angry and unhappy about the long time this whole project takes than me, I'd for sure prefer to do a nice stressless job in industry and earn 5 to 10 times as much as I do with this project that I never meant to run as the only responsible person.

BR
jOERG

edit: on a mini sidenote: our git has been inproved and fixed again, and now Ahycka and Ceene can push too - sorry for the 6 days "downtime": https://neo900.org/git/ee/

Since I can't invest what is required to get one, I'm just following the advances of Neo900 from very far. Nonetheless, I've stumbled on this thread about soldering issues during the GTA04 manufacturing process and possible consequences for the Neo900.

Could someone tell us what those consequences would be ?

thanks

The silence from the neo900 team means that the project is probably in deep trouble. Either they are working on a solution or a way to wrap things up.

It has been mentioned a few times already that most communication regarding the Neo900 is done on their IRC channel. See irc log for the discussion regarding this topic.

https://irclog.whitequark.org/neo900/2017-02-22

Great. So everyone should each and every day seat in front of IRC just to be updated? Or each day read the logs from botom to top?

Or they have something like this:
http://neo900.org/ <-- it states "NEWS"
or this:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=93498 <-- it states there "Announcements related to Neo900"

or even this:
https://twitter.com/neo900ug

or what ever.

3 years ago I have donated my N900 for this project believing in it. Today I have more doubts than faith. Situations like this do not bring confidence. No news no nothing. Just RTF IRC ?

I think the IRC channel is quite informative and the team seems to be responsive there. The people that are most involved in this project are usually logged in and available. It takes a few minutes to read weeks of discussions and I don't think anything is hidden from the public.

After reading the IRC messages and compared to similar projects I have followed I assume that it can still take a while before a Neo900 prototype will be built.
Some messages from IRC I thought were quite telling:

Current status - still working on designing the pcb

The soldering issue:

To end on a more positive note...

TBH I haven't pre-ordered because of exactly this: delays and uncertainties. I do wish the Neo900 team the best though. I am not saying they cannot do a better job communicating, but they are surely carrying most of the burden this community effort takes.

[on behalf of atk/Arch-TK (Tomasz Kramkowski) who has no account - yet. Many thanks for this fine summary!]

Today on IRC me (atk) and Joerg discussed an issue which has recently surfaced
on the tinkerphones mailing list [1] regarding the yields Nikolaus Schaller of
goldelico reported with the production of the GTA04A5.

The yields reported by Nikolaus are at 30% which is obviously not financially
viable for production; the issue has been identified as warping during the
soldering of the Samsung PoP [2] memory and DM3730 to the PCB.

The reason this issue has not appeared on prior devices (OpenPandora and
GTA04A4) is because those devices have used Micron PoP memory instead of
Samsung PoP memory which unfortunately is no longer in production.

Since the Neo900 project is also based around the DM3730 it will also need to
use very similar memory and there is a high risk that the issues which arose
during the production of the GTA04A5 will arise during the production of the
Neo900.

There are however some methods that Joerg described which could be used to
mitigate the issue and bring yields to acceptable figures:

Pre-stacking [3] is a method where the PoP memory chip is first soldered to the
DM3730 before being placed on the PCB and reflowed; this method should reduce
the warping and stresses caused by the usual method of soldering such stacked
chips which simply involves soldering them all in one go.

Another option that Joerg has suggested is filling the gap between the
pre-stacked chips with underfill before the chips are soldered to the PCB. This
should make the combined package considerably more rigid and prevent the issues
caused by warping.

Joerg believes that there is a good chance that the sum of these two methods
should solve the yield problems of these "unsolderable" chips. Joerg feels
testing the approach should not cost too much and that the costs incurred would
be in production, as most assembly lines do not have the equipment for
pre-stacking. To add to this, the new idea of adding underfill to the
pre-stacked chips before they are soldered has never been done before.

Joerg estimates the additional production costs may be around $10 to $20 per
device however I personally feel this is an acceptable cost if it means
increased durability of the device.

The full details of the conversation can be found in the logs here:
https://irclog.whitequark.org/neo900...03-14#19041338

[1]: http://lists.goldelico.com/pipermail...ry/001571.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_on_package
[3]: http://www.ti.com/lit/an/swpa182c/swpa182c.pdf#19