Futur De La Ds-x En Terme De Qualité De Fabrication

[Janek]

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.

Modifié le 27 octobre 2006 par Janek

[foxy99]

j'ai commancé à lire puis j'ai zappé

trop long a lire

Sinon c'est sympa de répondre avec de vrai message et pas des pauvre phrase baclé

[Janek]

Sa réponse vaut le coup d'être lue en entier pour être tout à fait honnête. Il y décrit les tests fait, le choix sur les composants (notamment les pins), les problèmes liés au plastique, les contacts et relance auprès des fournisseurs...

[demirun]

ce genre de reponse tend a me rassurer quant au suivi du DSX par la team....

j'suis confiant du coup

[Janek]

Je suis d'accord avec toi demirun. D'ailleurs j'achéterai un DS-X mais j'attends un peu pour avoir des cheaps de meilleures qualités de fabrication au niveau du plastique...

[foxy99]

D'ailleurs une idée m'est venu a l'esprit

Je sais pas si c'est réalisable car j'attends toujours mon DS-X livré demain mais peut etre peut on virer l'ensemble de la coque et la remplacer par une moins cheap.

Du style la team DS-X proposera plus tard juste des coque de remplacement. Ca pourrait etre une idée non ??

[Janek]

Fadura bien la découper pour pouvoir faire passer le mini-usb et les leds

sinon je pense que c'est effectivement une bonne idée.

[Janek]

Je me suis aperçu que mes liens étaient foireux. Je les ai corrigé ainsi cela permet de voir les réactions sur le sujet au niveau du support ds-x mais il faut s'enregistrer.

[Janek]

La qualité de fabrication sera au rendez-vous de façon quasi sûre avec la 3ème livraison.

Voici une réponse de moo qui explique tout ça : comme quoi parfois il y a des explications bien rationnelles au retard que nous avons constaté sur les récentes commandes et franchement la raison en vaut le coup.

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Hi,

Good questions. The short version of my answer is YES. The long version follows :-)

Ok, delays in production and supply (ps3 anybody ;-) ) : Well the first thing to note is that it can take anything between 2 weeks to +8 weeks to get standard components and then a considerable time more than that to get custom made components.

Regarding the recent delay we are experiencing, its is actually a combination of factors but the critical factor was what I mentioned in my first post. We made some very strict and hard changes to the quality control in multiple places of the supply chain. The primary filter is what caused the majority of this delay. This was set up at the plastic case supplier, where each case was manually inspected prior to shipping on to us. This meant that in some cases the plastic parts needed to be polished or scrapped completely. We are currently pushing for the 2nd supplier to deliver the final first article so we can approve it for start of their production. We hope by the end of next week the plastic case issue will be put to rest once and for all.

We have also actioned and maintain the final inspection and filtering step at the assembly factory.

The important thing to note out of this is that there is no design change at all , such a step especially in the case of the plastic case would be a minimum 8 week delay. A design fault or error is something much more serious and would have prompted us to come out and make an official announcement with an action plan behind it. This is clearly a quality control issue specific to one supplier of parts. From the perspective of the average customer sometimes this is very hard to see, simply because he/she does not have a clear view of the overall units on the market. As you correctly stated we are waiting on batch 3. Batch 1 had about 2-3% Batch 2 (filtering only at the assembly plant) less than 1 % so now with the dual filter we expect to have either eliminated the issue or have a very very low incidence in terms of %. Ideally we are striving for 0% and the way to achieve that is to limit the need for manual filtering, to do that you need to be able to select your final over all quality by setting up multiple supply chains of the component in question, you then step in and simply demand quality from your suppliers, with no worry about delay.

One final note: If there are any customers who have chosen to try and repair their case but have failed to get their units to work AND have damaged their case in the attempt. We are very reasonable about this, especially for batch 1. Please contact us or your reseller, we will ensure that your guarantee is not voided.

Thank you to those who took the time to read through and reply.

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[Makikata]

C'est pour des réponses de ce type que je fais confiance à la team.

J'espère juste que je n'aurai pas un produit foireux au final

[ffred59]

Le "third batch" arrive petit à petit ...

Alors les chanceux, çà donne quoi maintenant niveau qualité ?