Our journey in UP AI Edge is taking much longer than we had initially anticipated. Whenever we find ourselves close to the delivery date, a technical issue seems to pop up.
Being pioneers for bringing AI into product, we have certainly gained a lot of experience in ways of steering our platform to make it much easier to adapt, however, we have failed when it comes to the management of the project schedule which has caused a delay. We would like to share some insights of what’s going on with the schedule;
UP Core Plus:
The new delivery schedule is early March for all Kickstarter backers. For UP shop order, the fulfillment will start from the end of March. We were quite confident to deliver in January until we found out that there is a failure rate of 0.3% at 0-10 degree C under OS level. When we investigated further, we found that the root cause of the problem is the new eMMC. It was switched from a 2D to a 3D production process at the suppliers side. The timing of this new eMMC is different from the one we had in the design verification stage. To adapt to this change, we had to opt for a new schematics design and adjust some electronic components. New schematics means another 6 weeks from geber-out till PCB fabrication. You may wonder why we would struggle for a 0.3% failure rate? It is simply because we design it with industrial standards, and failure with unknown causes really bothered us. We also really want to deliver a reliable product.
NetPlus:
The delivery is scheduled in April. We could have delivered NetPlus earlier, however, we decided to go for the next level while we are waiting for our UP Core Plus new schematics. You may ask what is the next level? Well, we are going to upgrade all Kickstarter NetPlus rewards from Intel i211 chip to i210. With i210, you will have the TSN (Time-Sensitive Networking) feature. It allows you to use more within the networking application. For UP Shop order, you can choose to upgrade to i210 if you would like.
Vision Plus X:
The delivery is in March. We have stabilized the design with 3x Myriad X, running with OpenVINO R5. Everything is ready for production now.
AI Plus:
The delivery is uncertain, yet we anticipate it to be May or June. We had under-estimated the complexity of the design when it comes to FPGA carrier boards. We rely on our partners to validate this for us. Until recently we were able to finalize the schematics and undertake the DVT (design verification test) This seems to be the toughest one for us to bring to life.
We haven’t forgotten our commitment to deliver and we are working hard on it, we will share our progress as often as we can. Thank you for your understanding and support.
AI is not easy, and we are on our way to making it all happen!