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An Anonymous Coward writes:

A few weeks ago we published an update about the forthcoming [release] of our Librem 5 development kits when we ran into some issues which caused delays. Today we’re bringing you another update on the hardware fabrication process, as well as some pictures and a video. At the same time as the last update got posted, I was on my way to California, where we are fabricating our development kit and base boards (we are bringing everything to life there, and shipping from that same facility).

The story of fabricating the entire devkit hardware from the ground-up included crossing paths with a couple of storms:

- Hurricane Florence caused some shipping delays for component parts, and one of our packages also got lost in Memphis—maybe it enjoyed the music and drinks a bit too much? We don’t know because we never heard back from it again. So we had to procure additional parts.

- The typhoon in south east China caused a week of factory shutdowns, which included our PCB design prototypes!

- Almost right after that was a Chinese holiday, the Golden Week, which is in practice a two week holiday. Luckily we could expedite the PCBs at a fab in Los Angeles and courier ship to us!

All in all, we had a setback of about three weeks before we were able to make the first prototypes of the boards.

[...]

All parts for the final production of the dev kits are procured and still waiting in the magazines on the machines to be placed on the final boards. The kernel team is making amazing progress on mainline Linux 4.18+, we are in intense communication with other Linux i.MX 8M mainlining partners. The kernel, the GPU drivers and MESA will see quite some i.MX 8M patches from us—and yes, upstream first was and is our motto, everything we do is and will be pushed upstream!

After all this, I am reluctant to give a new timeline for shipping the dev kits…

https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-2018-11-hardware-report/

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