Monthly Archives: September 2016

Why are we using the White PCB?

Many curious people have asked me such question (PS: we did not kill any cat yet). This is always a little secret of VoCore, but today I will talk. It is not only about its looks better, also it is part of quality control.

PCB mainly has six colors, green, blue, red, yellow, white, black. (the truth is you can choose any RGB 24bits color you like, somebody even choose purple)

Most of the factories love black and green, that is because the first pass yield around 95% ~ 98%, the not good ones will send back to workers and repair, during the repairing, the pcb boards have to be heated to 260C again, green and black pcb is good but white pcb will change to light yellow one.

Most repaired ones are good, but the quality might come low. Sn after heat and heat again will partly become SnO2, SnO2 is not conductor and have a high chance broken the connection.

So we decide we only ship the first pass VoCore to users, and use white PCB to make it easy to check every VoCore we shipped is first class quality.

PS: another fact is I am lazy, keep them 100% good rate so I can have more time on bed but not shipping the packages again and again. :p

VoCore2: Current Progress

Last month, I spend a lot of time on DMA and ALSA driver, fight with the noise, optimized every feature(I also made a fork on github.com/vonger, welcome everyone).

Really sorry for the delay, but my only target is to make it to the best I could, not the cost or the deadline.

PS: I heard many companies even big company, they just make their products usable but not extreme, because there are deadline, market, pressure from investor, lack of professional engineer etc…They are telling me, the end user do not know the much tech, so who care…

But I want VoCore2 not only to be the tiny computer but also the best router, the best embed wireless platform, if I can not make it to what I want, why waste the time? There are thousands of such boards already.

Now I am still looking for possible flaw on VoCore2, once I am happy about the sample, it will go to production process. It should be very soon 🙂

Ethernet Transfer Speed: >= 95Mbps(iperf3), maximized.
Wireless 802.11n Transfer Speed: >= 100Mbps(iperf3), maximized too. —- Most routers same test condition only reach around 90Mbps.
USB Transfer Speed: maximized.
SDXC(SD card) Transfer Speed: maximized.
The Power Consume: 75mA.

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