The €100 introductory discount per Argon drive is valid until 4.10.2013. No minimum or maximum order quantity limits apply!
The one time introductory offer of Argon
Argon production is finally fully operational, so no longer long waits! After placing the order (until Oct 4), there is 21 days time to complete payment to keep the order and discount active. For ordering, see Argon web shop.
Update: whooops, I had wrong month name here (Aug). Now fixed to Oct!
Today I visited the factory manufacturing Argon drives and delivered the testing system as designed earlier and instructed them the usage of it.
SMT assembled Argon circuit boards on a tray waiting for automatic optical inspection (AOI)
Regardless of Asian EMS services eating European manufacturers’ jobs, this company seems to be doing very well. There were brand new SMT pick’n’place machines and nitrogen atmosphere wave soldering equipment waiting for commissioning to increase the number of manufacturing lines. I was told that the nitrogen atmosphere soldering gives better solder quality than normal air atmosphere systems.
It seems that production is little bit behind from the last estimate, but these boards should be ready during this week if they accept the testing system as is. There was some talk about how to change it for their habits better, but I hope its quick change if needed.
After Argon prototypes have been inspected, analyzed, measured and stress tested in every imaginable way and found no flaws, we have no choice but start believing it’s as good as it needs to be!
This is a great day for me and Granite Devices – Argon servo drive hardware is now fully completed and officially available worldwide via the web shop! Argon is launched with an limited time introductory price of 389 eur/pcs while the normal price is 489 eur/pcs.
ARGON in the web shop
While hardware is being shipped to the first customers, Granity configuration software and documentation Wiki will be finished and made officially available. So if one receives drive within next days, one may need to wait some time for Granity become available before drives are usable.
ARGON product page in the main web site
“If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” That could describe the ideology behind the quality assurance procedure designed for the Argon drives. The testing hardware & software platform is now fully complete and I did already run the tests for the drives I have in my hands now. This means, drives are being now prepared for shipping!
There will be a dedicated post when items are placed to our web shop for ordering. It could be today or tomorrow!
Testing procedure of Argon drives is ~80% done now. The testing system consists of:
The testing software is based on Granity with some modifications.
Argon testing application work in progress. Most of the UI stuff will be ripped off from the polished testing version and instead provide only a simple “start test” button to eliminate human error.
I will start testing the first drives as soon as the test software fulfills it’s all technical requirements and bring first drives to market ASAP. Polishing the software for assembly house can wait couple of weeks as it will affect only next production batches.
More Argon drives have arrived. Mandatory parts of lab tests with the new hardware are done and everything is looking good hardware point of view!
More Argon drives
The only thing remaining before the drives are placed on sale & ready for shipment is finalization of the testing routine. As mentioned in earlier posts, every aspect of the drives must be verified before they’re good to go. Nothing is left on chance.
Amounts of items returned is not just a number for us. We take testing & quality very seriously because we don’t want (and don’t have) many returns due to defects. Having >99% yield helps to save our time and also leads to reduced cost to customer. I think it’s also nice to buy hardware you can count on :)
Got some mail today including 500 pcs of Argon boxes and 60 pcs of SimpleMotion V2 USB adapters. Couldn’t spot any flaws in either of them!
A pallet of Argon cardboard boxes. The boxes are very rigid and printing is sharper than expected making the artwork shine :)
A box of fresh USB SimleMotion V2 adapters. Adapters are fully tested in the assembly house.
In the other news, I have been lately creating contents to the Argon user guide Wiki which must have the mandatory parts written and proof read before the drive can be released to market. As this will take some time (as well as finishing & packaging Granity software), we probably start sales & delivers for experienced users first (this probably means you, my fellow blog reader!). This can be done as hardware is final and rest of the materials are delivered over the Internet anyway.
Part of the documentation. Work in progress.
On Friday we received the first release candidate units of Argon servo drive completely assembled.
Argon final version. The very first of their kind!
Today we finished programming the Argon microcontrollers and sent them back to the assembly house. Production will start once all remaining components have arrived to the factory. We’re still waiting enclosures, should be less than a week away.
Chips being programmed in a clam shell socket. The chips are handled with a vacuum pen. The environment is made ESD safe to prevent expensive errors.
Meanwhile I designed a testing procedure for the new kind of USB adapters that are produced same time with Argon drives. One SimpleMotion V2 USB adapter is necessary to configure drives and it may be also used to create PC based motion control applications for them.
SimpleMotion V2 USB adapter
Without too much thinking I wrote a code to Argon’s STM32 ARM processor that write protects its flash content. After a minute I encountered a problem that I was unable to program anything new to the chip as it protects writing into memory also with a debugging tool effectively bricking the device. It took an hour to figure out how to restore the chip option bytes that determine if the flash memory is protected or not. JLink’s small utility that is supposed to restore STM32 option bytes didn’t appear to work for write protection so alternative solution was necessary to avoid replacing the chip on PCB.
After some googling (found this useful forum post) and reading chip data sheets I figured out how to do it manually with JLink Commander tool. I’m posting JLink command list here as I’m sure there are people needing this info, too.
(unprotect option bytes)
w4 0x40023c08,0x08192A3B
g
halt
w4 0x40023c08,0x4C5D6E7F
g
halt
(restore non-write protected state. one could also reset other option bytes here such as read protection or brown out reset settings by modifying the next line)
w2 0x40023C16,0xffff
g
halt
(write option bytes)
w1 0x40023C14,0xef
g
halt
I’m not sure if g and halt commands are necessary but used them just in case. This should work at least with STM32F2 series and probably also STM32F3 and STM32F4 chips too.
JLink Commander screenshot after unlocking STM32F2 write protection