Hello,
Comme vous le savez, j'ai ouvert hier un incident à propos de la qualité de fabrication du DS-X actuel sur le site de support du DS-X. Je viens d'avoir une réponse très argumentée de "moo". Sa réponse est en anglais et je vous la livre telle quelle car elle est trop longue à traduire. Elle reste toutefois très facile à comprendre. Sachez qu'ils prennent très au sérieux tous les problèmes rencontrés (card inserted...) et qu'ils ont déjà pris des mesures pour pallier aux problèmes hardware.
Pour rappel :
- voici les termes dans lesquels j'ai ouvert l'incident : "Hi,
One major problem seems to be the manufacturing quality of the card. I attach a picture of the pin after only few hours (around 8) of use. What will it be after a week or a month. Will it be able to work properly ? Did you perform test ? Did you experienced the same behaviour ? "
- voici le lien sur l'incident ouvert --> http://support.ds-x.com/view.php?id=25 et le lien sur la photo que j'avais joint http://www.sanqualis.com/images/card.jpg
Voici la réponse de moo :
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Hi, in order to best assist your concerns I will make some assumptions about what exactly you are worried about.
1. From the pictures I think you are pointing at the scratch marks on the far left contact point ?
2. From the thread posts it seems there is a general concern about the mass production build quality.
3. From both of the above the main concern is the reliability of the product over time.
Some answers:
1. When I first saw that particular picture, the fist thing I did was remove my personal cart which has been in use for months and check. There are minor marks such as these in this link http://img351.imageshack.us/img351/3303/dsc03869wb5.jpg [^]
But not the deep marks. We did ask the user of the "deep marks" pic if he had previously used third party hardware which has been known to damage the spring loaded contact points of the DS, he/she denies such usage. From my personal experience, markings of that nature are due to damaged, DS side, contact points. In developing the DS-Xtreme we did various tests of competing products to highlight weak points in their design, during those tests we did manage to damage a few DS units, and we took the physical design of our product very seriously from there on ! Another point to add here is the fact that the picture you point to has uneven scratch marks (different pins have different degrees of scratch marks) this again points to DS side excessive stress or roughness due to previous ware and tare or abuse from other products. Please note that I can only make assumptions about what I see in the pictures posted, the customer who posts these pictures and reports his/her history of use has final say, and I respect that.
Now to the picture I linked to. This to me is closer to what I have on my unit, this is very normal and perfectly ok. What you will notice is that over time those marks will remain as is and not worsen in any way. The marks are only to be expected, Gold is a very malleable metal, and so is copper, what you have here is a gold plated copper base with a very thin fiberglass substrate. The key difference is actually the thin fiberglass and not the copper or gold. A normal PCB thickness is about 5 times as think ( i.e. 5 times as thick fiberglass) this obviously gives a better base so less "scratching" is evident to the naked eye. Scratching does occur regardless of the base thickness, on the DS-Xtreme it is more indentations than scratching. Again though the question is how will this affect the longevity of the product? The answer is simple, indentations vs scratching is irrelevant when the thickness of base copper is the same. Gold plating is used in electronics as a way to prevent oxidation, gold is only an ok conductor of electricity, its the copper that does the work, the gold only protects the copper underneath. So is the gold being removed and the copper exposed ? The answer is no, to understand this you need to think more in terms of liquids and blending, you will always have atoms of gold intermixed with the copper, it is NOT like a layer of paint, the gold remains, it does not flake off.
Now for some proof, I and others of our dev group have had their units (exactly the same pcb same assembly and manufacturing as those out today) and have been using them to test the OS, for approximately 3 months now. there are times where I can honestly say I personally have removed and re-inserted my cart over 400 times just in one day.(Picture compiling, testing , changing a small file in the skin, retesting etc etc) Our units are still perfectly happy, with no signs of excessive ware and tare.
2. Yes the general case mold quality has me concerned as well, I will be very honest about this. For this reason we have already action changes to the quality control at factory. We have also sent a very strict warning to our plastic mold supplier, and in fact already started dealing with a 2nd plastic case mold supplier to ensure a competitive advantage exists for the betterment of our end user and product. Please understand that there are multiple companies involved in making this unit. Every company we deal with is ISO certified, currently this is the only way to ensure a certain degree of quality is passed on to each section of the design.
Having said this, I must specify my concerns before a panic ensues ! There are 2 issues I have seen which caught my attention. Both of which came out from user complaints in the forums. (a) the upper clips of some cases arriving unclipped, this is not critical to the function of the device but it does affect the esthetic look and feel and it will be rectified, it is actually a combination of final assembly and plastic mold tolerance. Both the supplier of the plastic cases and the assembler plant have been informed about this issue and we are working together to ensure future units will be free of this problem. From what I have seen all users who have received their DS-Xtreme with the upper corner clips unlatched, simply pushed them back in place and that was the end of the issue.
( some case molds have excessive plastic either side of the contact separators, we are still investigating this issues to determine if in fact it is the cause of many, if not all the "DS Cart not recognized" issues that customers are reporting. Personally after seeing at least one user fully rectify this issue by carefully clearing the excess plastic, and also reading about other users using paper to change the angle of incretion, I think this is the case. YES this is a problem and it is a problem that we have taken very seriously. If we were aware of the issue before release we would have filtered all the units by careful visual inspection. We sadly only became aware after release. The reason is, only a very few units are affected (so far from our calculations less then 2-3%). Another interesting point here is the fact that this seems to be very much a co-tolerance related issue. Why?? Well because we have very strict instructions with the assembly factory that EACH and EVERY DS-Xtreme be physically tested in a DS unit prior to packaging. This point can also be seen in that some users report that their units intermittently work, or that after inserting a few times the unit settles down and is happy. The co-tolerance is a situation where one DS unit has a slight difference to another DS unit, just like one DS-Xtreme will have a slight difference to another. Its the cases where these differences over lap that these problems become apparent.
3. When we first announced our product, many people wrote in or posted in forums questioning the USB connector and how reliable it would be. I personally took head to their concerns and ensured this would not be a weak point of our device. I challenge the daring to stress the USB connector ! ( and NO! we will not replaced a snapped pcb! Yes the pcb will snap before the USB connector is removed). Every aspect of our design has been carefully reviewed to ensure the product will remain functional and reliable. For those who know about semiconductors and the electronics industry, go ahead and investigate the design from top to bottom, you will very quickly see that we did not cut any corners, where we had a choice between a cheaper less reliable part we opted for the more expensive guaranteed parts, where we could have got away with tin plating the PCB for half the price we opted for gold plating to ensure a long lasting contact point. Where we had the slightest concern about the physical dimensions of the case mold, Yes, we opted to delay release by months to ensure a smooth and safe fit. But like everything in this world we live in, not everything is always 100% perfect, we have a few plastic issues, and they are not something we are taking lightly, they will be resolved and we will make sure that we keep a very strict eye on the factories involved in our production line. Our device is guaranteed and we will always have a very strict pride in our products. Every last customers opinion means a lot to us, and we respect it. Our goal is to achieve a Zero tolerance on defect, over a very short period we hope to be as close as humanly possible to this goal.
In closing this excessively long post, you are welcome to wait and see from other users of our product(s) how reliable over time they prove to be. You can also simply take a look at what we have set up in the past few months to ensure customer satisfaction, the multi lingual global support through alliances with major sites/forums. This support/bug tracking system. Our blogs. Our forums.We are not just one singular site pimping a product with no responsibility or recourse, any one of our partners/sites can cause us untold headaches and stress should one of their users be unhappy with our product. We set this up this way to ensure we felt and were forced to listen to each and every complaint. We actually have more systems in place for customer to come back to us and complain if they feel the need to, than we do to go out and promote our product. this is how we believe all consumer products should be.
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Merci à moo pour cette réponse.
