Today we have another exciting new update for you. We are happy to inform you about the progress we made last week.

Production progress

Chinese New Year is completely over and everyone is back in their offices! As we mentioned in our last update, we have had a meeting with Intel last week.

Together with the expertise of Intel, we further investigated the issues we faced before Chinese New Year. We are very pleased that the efforts our engineering team put into the resolution of this issue, led to a positive outcome of the meeting! Intel re-confirmed that our PCB design was good. We found that the defected computers that were filtered in our QC process, were caused by a simple IC, that in the case of the rejected PC’s, had wrong tolerances, according to its specification. Luckily for us it is possible for us to re-work and repair these PCBA’s, by replacing these IC’s.

With the tests we ran in the last couple of weeks and the knowledge we gained, we are now  also certain that we can quickly filter out, all units that are affected by this issue. This means that 100% of the, to be shipped out computers, passed all our rigorous QC tests.

We will focus on the re-work of the defected units later. The backers will get the units that passed our initial QC, with flying colors.

The last step in our process now, is to have an additional and completely independent third party QC. The QC will be performed by the highly qualified and independent organization: SGS. We decided to perform a 100% QC test once more, to ensure the quality and reliability you want. While some brands might rely on the internal factory QC only, most will hire an independent QC according to AQL (Acceptance Quality Limit), meaning the QC will only consider a sample quality of the total production batch. While this is well above “normal” standard, we chose for an additional 100% QC test, to ensure every produced Ockel Sirius A or Ockel Sirius A Pro will have the highest level of quality. A lot of you commented, that despite the delays, you were happy that we kept emphasizing on high quality. We feel that we deliver to that promise, with this decision also. We have a lot of confidence in our manufacturing partner and their QC process. But we also have only one chance for a first impression.  We want you to  have a delightful experience, after all the waiting, this is what all the backers deserve! Besides that, we save ourselves a lot of headache and costs, in terms of after sales service. The number of times after sales support would need be required, simply will be at the lowest reasonably possible.

Next steps

We will start with the independent Quality Control from tomorrow. Our expectation is that we will finish the Quality Control this week.  Immediately after we finish the Quality Control procedures, we will start with the last step, namely the cleaning and packaging process. If this is finished, we will start shipping the computers to all our backers.

Our expectation is that we will be able to start with the first shipments next week. Orders placed from outside Europe will be fulfilled directly from our production facility.
In parallel we will bulk ship both the produced Ockel Sirius A and Sirius A Pro’s to our warehouse in the Netherlands to fulfill the orders placed from backers living in Europe.

As soon as we have a detailed shipping timeframe we’ll update you.

Bottom-line, we found the cause & solutions for the issues we faced and are running on full force again.  The shipment to all of our backers is nearby and we do not give in on quality standards. We can’t wait to start with the shipping process. Bear with us for the last few steps and soon enough we will get back to you with a shipping update!

That’s it for now. As always, if you have any questions regarding our products or this update, please feel free to contact us at [email protected] or leave us a comment, here on Indiegogo. We answer all questions within 48 business hours (Monday-Friday)

See you next week,

The Ockel Team