Excellent!
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Is that classed as dwarf porn ? 
Great update and looks like things are moving in the right direction.
Glad things are working out and look forward to my little fella turning up soon.
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Very nice! It seems that you found the right factories for the mass production.
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Very reassuring.
And could we know the next production batchs size and planning ?
If possible.
Great news! Impressive process. Gives us a pretty good idea coordinating all aspects of the projects. And having the facilities located so close to each other and with a mod team close by will really streamline the whole process.
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This is great news.
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@CSurieux and all, let me give you a brief outlook. For 2021, we are planning multiple batches of 1k Dwarf each, ramping up right after the current validation of the production process. Having just returned from the factories I can tell that all stages in Germany won’t be the bottleneck. We also have procured enough material to get going at this scale. Though on parts supply, we will still have to work around shortages and deal with limited visibility for quite some time. Happy to share further updates on that moving forward.
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Thanks for the update. I saw this on the “Pre-launch Special” page. Can Kickstarter supporters expect the same? “Expected delivery between May 17th and May 28th, 2021.”
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IIRC I joined the Kickstarter campaign just a few minutes before the deadline. Hello from the back of the queue! 
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Hello,
good to see there were some serious progress made, and things look brighter now, keep fingers crossed for deliveries of required parts from overseas supplies 
I must say I had made some plans based on the Dwarf a few months ago, expecting availability first quarter of 2021, (not dec 2020, because this is a kickstarter project, even if Mod Devices has some solid experience now). All these delays led to finding substitutes and workarounds, that are not costless.
It would be disappointing to see the device available at retailers while the early backers are put on hold. I hope you can ship to all backers in the first runs, as word of mouth is a serious boost to introduction of a product to the market.
Thanks for the updates, and keep on good work. 
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Welcome to the mod devices forum!
Based on my experience with from the earliest days of the original modduo kickstarter project, the team is committed to shipping out the units in the sequence as promised in the original terms regarding what your pledge was. The time the products actually are ready to ship has changed due to many factors, most notably covid, but the order in which each supporter receives his item does not change. I’d be very surprised - shocked even - if the dwarf appears in stores before the products are shipped to the backers in the order promised even if the time frame shifts.
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As clearly stated, retail units will be sold and shipped in parallel whit backers unit. So there will be delays for backers’ units. This means, given a throughput of 2 units per diem, if on day 1 there are no retail units sold, 2 backers units will be shipped; on day2, if there is 1 retail unit sold, only 1 backer unit will be shipped. I think half of throughput will be allocated for retail units. They need to monetize to cover unexpected expenses for unexpected events. Please be kind, we’ve already got a huge discount as backers.That’s it.
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Backers do not mean kids .or naive … nice scenario but if no units are sold during 1 month, and even if only one by day is sold it means that in one month only 20 ‘backers’ units will be sent ?
And I am not sure that big guys as Thomann or Bax, etc, will receive only one unit ? Because they are the best way to sell something, far better than Mod Devices own web site.
???
1 by day it’s not realistic. I’d say hundreds per week.
About resellers, don’t know what’s the plan, maybe fees are too high atm to sell units via third party distributors. Maybe MOD Devices wants to sell on their own like Fractal Audio does. I’m not into it.
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So each week hundreds backers units sent , very nice.
Oops. Missed that in my reading of the terms. Thanks for the clarification.
@Harvey_Andruss, @Sanji.Bo
The plan right now is to ship crowdfunding units (non-beta) in parallel with direct sales on our website. This will be going on hopefully during summer.
@CSurieux we are focusing on these sales mainly to be direct. That means on our website. Units at this point will not be produced one by one, so the direct sales numbers will not have an immediate impact on the crowdfunding fulfillment. The goal is indeed to ship a lot per week.
Not sure if at this moment we have the capacity to ship hundreds (that is mainly due to the fact that even the mass production will be shipped from our office, at least for now). But the numbers should increase.
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Thank you so much for your continuous support and such nice and warmful words!
Indeed we are doing our best every single day! I personally can’t say that I feel less than a lot of love from every single person that is working on this project. As it happens when we love something so much it is easy to get frustrated when things completely split over our own possibilities and plans go wrong. Not a single person inside MOD team wishes less than everyone to have their MOD Dwarf as soon as possible and enjoy our devices and our platform. We, more than anyone, want to listen and watch the wonders that you all will be creating with a device that makes us so proud.
But unfortunately, this last year and something proved to everyone on this planet that even the more detailed sculpted plans can simply collapse from one moment to the other without our influence or control.
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We had a very productive second week of our MOD Dwarf factory visit. Now that we are back in the office in Berlin we have some time to reflect and share our progress with our loyal supporters!
While our first week was focused on material flow, the second week was mostly focused on the knowledge transfer from the MOD office team to the factory team. We consolidated all of our learnings from the Beta Unit production into a very comprehensive assembly manual, as well as some other important documentation, part of which you can see fixed to the wall in images below. Then we worked with the factory team, assembling units together and onboarding the assembly process one step at a time.
Circuit Board Assembly
As mentioned in the previous update, we received a sample batch of mainboards from the PCBA factory. We verified that the boards are working properly with only some minor tweaks needed to ensure that the production process is consistent and reliable. The factory now has the green light to produce 300 mainboards to coincide with the already made controller boards. Here you can see the first of these being made. First there is a jet printer applying solder paste onto the bare PCB. The board then moves automatically to the pick and place machine where the components are added. After this, the boards go into the oven (which we could not film), where the soldering paste is melted to electrically and mechanically fix the components in place.
Parts
It’s hard to contain your excitement seeing boxes full of parts ready to be assembled. As mentioned in the previous update, we were expecting SoMs to arrive on Monday. Despite many of our previous orders being delayed for a myriad of reasons, usually boiling down to the pandemic, by some miracle, they arrived! So now we have all the parts ready to produce the first 300 units. Some longer lead time parts such as enclosures have already arrived in much higher quantities and we have many more parts on the way. These images are just the tip of the iceberg of the boxes that are open. You can also see some enclosures already pre assembled with displays attached.
Production
Knowledge transfer was the main goal for the week, but having a full understanding of the process and details requires practice. So we worked with the factory team to help set up a series of assembly stations which align with the individual steps in the assembly manual. This is a dynamic process meaning it will change and improve over time. In the end the factory will have the freedom to adjust their set up to improve their quality and output, but we gave them a solid foundation to start with and a process that we could demonstrate as being quite effective.
The workers at the factory asked to not be photographed for their own privacy so we put one our own, Flavia, to work for some action shots. After all she has built many Dwarfs already.
Testing
As with the production process, the testing process is dynamic and always improving. We have defined specific testing kits which are used for different tests in our own “MOD Factory Deploy Tool”. The tool is capable of testing the individual functionalities of the complete devices as well as the individual PCBs. We test the PCBs at each stage of assembly so that if any problems come up we can troubleshoot quickly and easily to pinpoint the issue and apply the necessary treatment to fix it. The tool exports all kinds of data including the full testing logs as well as audio frequency response plots so we can really dissect every little detail. The tool also handles device registration so that we can keep track of the devices and apply the correct access and licenses. There have been huge improvements to the tool in recent months and it will continue to improve so that we can improve efficiency and scale up with production growth. One important key to this is the development of a Raspberry Pi image which means we can easily scale the number of testing machines as the quantity increases.
Final thoughts
We are heading into a very exciting stage for the MOD Dwarf. The parts are ready, the design is verified and the process is stable. Of course we expect to encounter more challenges moving forward as we try to ramp up production, as any company does. We will continue to keep you updated.
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We just posted our first hands on video of the Dwarf in action. Check it out and let us know what you think
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