The folks at the toaster company are working on integration and environmental testing of the Advanced Tactical Toaster.
A question that came up led me to revisit my lab notes.
I received the #1 prototype controller board late in the afternoon of June 17th. 2011.
Not actually being on the critical path at that stage, I took my (calendar) time about working through a great many issues, rework cycles, and so on - also, I was doing a lot of the firmware development during this time; only the rudiments were done before the first hardware showed up, partly because of the difficulty of testing most parts of the firmware without the live hardware, and mostly because I'd been busy designing the hardware.
Anyway, somewhere around last August 12th, the controller board was in a state that would have allowed integration to begin. The actual start of integration was, IIRC, held up by a couple of other vendors, but got kinda-sorta started not too long after.
So, anyway, the integration phase has been going on for nigh unto a year now, and it's beginning to manifest the Product nature.
But there's one subsystem, see, that a Big-Name Vendor is supposed to be supplying, and it ought to be pretty darn easy, but they've been chewing on the requirement for rather over a year at this point and, so far as I know, the actual hardware is not forthcoming, so the prototypes are still using a rather lame workaround. (I was almost ready to offer to design that subsystem myself, but then I saw the size and shape of the space it had to fit in, and leaving it to a company that already does that sort of thing seemed a better idea. Except that, as it turns out, the company in question doesn't appear to be motivated, or maybe their one competent engineer left.)
Comments