So the contract work that shall not be named has been taking significantly longer than expected. On the bright side, it’s nearing a close and I’ve begun shifting gears back to isostick!

Down to the nitty-gritty, the changes:
The isostick will no longer feature a removable microSD card — instead it will have internal storage, likely either 8GB or 16GB. I know for some people this will be a big let-down and I apologize, I want the removable card as well! This decision is due to the extreme cost and expertise involved in designing and producing a reliable injection-molded case. Other case types were looked at, but I’ve decided that to bring the best product to market a prefab case will be used, probably one from the fine folks at New Age Enclosures.

As to the time line, we are leaning toward a second beta due to issues with yield on the first beta. This time the beta units will be assembled in the same place as the production units to eliminate the uncertainty of my lovely, non-temperature-controlled toaster oven. The second beta may also consist of a switch to an ARM9 MCU to get the highest speed possible: the AVR32 UC3A currently being used has a max SD bus frequency of 33MHz, whereas SDHC cards themselves (and the proposed ARM9 MCU) max out at 50MHz. Still, the AVR32 provides respectable maximum throughput of around 12MiB/s. We’ll see 😉

That’s all for now, time to get back to work!