Hello. My name’s Fraser. I’m at BERG helping out with Little Printer as production ramps up and the pre-orders come in, and it’s great fun. I’m learning a lot of interesting stuff (my background is in the music industry, and in kittens), and new words and phrases are being added to my vocabulary at an almost alarming rate.
One such addition is EMC (electromagnetic compatibility) testing. This is a process all electrical goods must go through before they’re manufactured. It seeks to ensure that a product isn’t susceptible to unwanted electromagnetic interference, and isn’t producing such radiation itself. Passing is a legal requirement. In other words, if you switch on your gleaming new espresso machine and the toaster starts to hum, it’s possible the EMC testing wasn’t as robust as it might have been.
Nick and Andy prepared a number of Bridge units for testing on Monday (the Bridge is Little Printer’s connection to the BERG Cloud, enabling us to introduce new services without owners having to update anything). These were whisked off to a laboratory in Cambridge, who sent back the results yesterday, and those graphs are being examined now. We didn’t pass, but we’ve failed the test before, and we’re much closer this time.
Next steps? Some tweaks will be made to the boards in Slovenia. They’ll be re-built, and re-tested. Tweak and test. Tweak and test. When we’re okay, we’ll do some more formal testing. And all this will be completed before we ship.
Elsewhere this week, the latest version of BERG Cloud Remote was rolled out to our internal staging server. Remote is the mobile web-app that enables owners to manage their Little Printer subscriptions, and several staffers at BERG have Little Printers at home. They’ll be testing the new functionality we’ve added, and reporting back.
Out on the web, Andre Torrez said some nice things about Little Printer, and about the API. We liked this passage a lot:
If you make things for people on the web and you take some time to read the API documentation the little gears in your head will start turning. This isn’t just a printer you print documents with. It is a content delivery service that doesn’t require a computer.
Little gears turning? Download the Publisher’s Handbook for more detailed information and a practical guide to our developer API.
More as it happens…
—Fraser Lewry