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New Documentation, New CM and More

Hi Reader,

Some updates from the last few weeks:

Regulatory Updates

Our European distributor, Elektor, was contacted by German authorities who found some problems with the documentation being supplied with the Mooshimeter.  Specifically, they said not enough safety information was distributed on paper with the device itself.  We’re working to correct this and the next manufacturing run of Mooshimeters will include additional product safety information and regulatory compliance statements.

If you follow this blog, you will know the great pains we took going through radio and product safety testing in 2014, so we’re not worried that the product violates any standard.  There are simply some requirements about the paper documentation that we must work harder to follow.

Apps and Firmware: Beta->Production

The beta apps and firmware will soon be released as production.  For the last few weeks I’ve been hunting lingering bugs and have chased most of them down to the OS level – ie. many of them are not in Mooshimeter code, they are in iOS, Android, or TI’s BLE stack.  I’ve submitted bug reports where relevant and tried to implement work arounds where possible.

Overall the stability of the beta is better than the production version, so I’ll be pushing it to production very soon.  There are a flotilla of new features that I hope people will find useful, and the software is much better instrumented to provide bug data through Crashlytics, which has already proven its worth in beta testing.

Mooshception

The firmware presently in beta is being baked in to a new “golden image” which will be put in to Mooshimeters in the factory.  One of the best tools I have for testing power consumption on the new firmware image is actually other Mooshimeters running the new firmware.  Logging reliability is much improved, even at relatively high speeds.  So for testing the power consumption of a meter in shipping mode, I just used another meter logging at high speed to an SD card.

img_57884bdc8491f

Above is the current consumption of a meter in shipping mode.  Every 10 seconds it wakes up to check if the C and Ω are shorted and the meter should wake up.  If you look at the power consumption graph above, you’ll notice the meter is drawing significant current about 20% of the time – much too high!  This is because of ADC settling time and a few optimizations I added to the firmware to improve measurement accuracy in the new firmware versions.

But we don’t need <1% accuracy for determining if the test leads are shorted.  A few code revisions later, shipping mode power consumption looks like this:

img_57884be5899f9

Much better.  Average current consumption is reduced by an order of magnitude.  A Mooshimeter can sit on a shelf like this for years.  And as the firmware image is nailed down, that leads me to:

New Contract Manufacturer and Preparation for another Production Run

Until now, we’ve been using Sencore Electronics for contract manufacturing, and I am extremely grateful to them.  Their service has been absolutely phenomenal, the Mooshimeter wouldn’t have come as far as it has without them.  But they are leaving the contract manufacturing business entirely to build their own products (they make video equipment).  At their recommendation, future Mooshimeters will be manufactured at Electronic Systems Inc. (ESI).  I’m very excited to get to know ESI, so far I’ve had only email and phone contact with them.

The next production run is scheduled to start in early August, so I will have more updates for you then from Sioux Falls, South Dakota (where both Sencore and ESI are located).  That’s all for now, thanks for reading

~James

 

10 Responses to “New Documentation, New CM and More”

  1. Kathy July 30, 2016 at 5:54 am #

    Congrats, James. Excellent progress. Good update.

  2. Seth July 30, 2016 at 10:09 am #

    Awesome, James. Good luck with ESI, I hope they serve you well. My company might be buying a few of your meters as we need to do some long term voltage measurement logging and tying up a full blown datalogger just isn’t worth it. The Mooshimeter will fit this bill perfectly :)

  3. hans August 13, 2016 at 11:34 pm #

    Good luck with the new manufacturer. If there is one change that I would consider critical, and relatively cheaply to implement at this stage: use insulated battery clips for the “plus” side or add some heat shrink in a post-soldering phase. I’ve had several batteries die because of the short circuit that these clips WILL provoke. It even happens during initial shipping: 1 of the batteries that my device came with was dead. Apart from this being potentially dangerous, it is just a plain nuisance. And easy to fix. Some heat shrink and it’s done. When you prepare this, you can keep this manufacturing step at around 15 seconds per device.

  4. Yves September 8, 2016 at 7:46 am #

    James, installed the final iOS version (and its Sept. 6 update).

    Any chance of a documentation up to date?

    Regards

    Yves

    • James September 9, 2016 at 11:17 am #

      Hi Yves,

      Yes, I am trying to improve the documentation. I’m moving more of it over to the wiki: https://moosh.im/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

      I think the wiki is up to date but the pdfs are behind. Once I add a little more to the wiki I plan on removing the pdfs entirely, or installing some software to generate the pdf from the wiki so I don’t have to keep regenerating documents :)

      ~James

  5. anderml55 October 20, 2016 at 11:05 am #

    Looking great James.
    The wiki information is great. I would be fine with removing the PDF documentation as long as you turn on the PDF or book generation feature in the wiki. I find having a PDF version of documents in Dropbox or download folders handy when I cannot get a connection to the Internet.
    Thanks,
    Mark

    • James October 23, 2016 at 10:10 am #

      Thanks Mark

  6. Daniel B. January 7, 2018 at 1:17 pm #

    Good day,

    Can someone change the CSS settings so that we can read the comments and replies on your https://moosh.im/2016/07/updates/ page ?

    Perhaps that would explain why people stopped replying as they thought there was no text or is it that the “I’m not a robot” checkbox is hidden under the submit button ?

    Regards.

    • James January 8, 2018 at 6:45 pm #

      Thanks for bringing this to my attention – I don’t know why the text turned white. Looking in to it now…

      • James January 9, 2018 at 12:37 pm #

        Still not sure why that happened but should be fixed now, thanks.

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