In the background, we have been working hard to put all the last bits and pieces together for our first production run. This is an incredibly complex process with literally hundreds of parts coming from sources, all around the world. Today we have the doubtful privilege, to give you the not so good news. Untill last week there was still a chance everything would be going to plan with the development of the Ockel Sirius A. All of the parts are in stock or planned to be there in time for our anticipated production schedule.

But unfortunately we were recently faced with a serious and industry wide delay for one of the parts. To be fully transparent, it involves the special (8 layered) PCB (printed circuit board) as used with our chipset and solution. While the normal leadtime is 25 days for this part, 2 weeks ago, the news came out of nowhere, that there is a delayed delivery time of now 60 days.  I have been pushing very hard to find a solution in the last weeks, to try to avoid this delay for you.

We have checked worldwide if there would be alternative, qualitative supplying partners. We have escalated and looked into the issue with both the Intel head engineering and supply chain management  of Asia, to see if they could use their influence, to push the PCB manufacturer or find others. Unfortunately even the power of Intel did have little effect, which confirms that there is an industry wide lack of a reliable and quick source right now. We did find one alternative factory but finally had to decide that it would be too much risk, with too little improvement of the lead time.

The PCB is crucial in the functioning and reliability of the device. We already intensely tested 50 units from the first pilot run. Switching the factory at this stage would also mean a new pilot production run would have to be made.

With this whole situation we are forced to update our delivery schedule. We know this is a bummer, especially because a lot of you are so excited to receive the device as soon as possible. We hope all backers understand that this part is very crucial, a motherboard  is at the core of the machine.  We hope everyone will agree that we can never sacrifice on the quality, especially with such a core component. Even at the cost of the delay.

We hope we can count on your patience and understanding one more time and we will keep you updated on the progress. The new schedule should allow us to start shipping the items to you late December/ early January.