Why did we need to go to Asia from our home sweet home?
For portable audio devices there are many key components SHARED with the booming smartphones. Guess how the percentage of smartphones made in Asia (mostly in China)? The data we see is 93% was made in Asia. LED screen is there. Battery is there. High precision CNC factory is there, as well as eMMC and ARM Core CPU manufacturing (the patent and IP is belong to England and USA).
Also, a lot of these vendors are world class BIG guys. It takes time and effort to communicate and negotiate with them for pricing/Minimum Order Quantity and schedule. Usually, the MOQ and Schedule are the KILLERS which create a lot of hoops we need to jump through. Our order quantity is just simply usually NOT big enough. And as usual, we insist we need to have the best quality. So the consequence is we need to poke and check out many vendors because for a lot of them, we are an interesting buyer and designer lab. But we are definitely not a "easy money" or "big cake" for them. This can lead to delays in manufacturing our LHL products.
The countries and cities that Larry travels in past two months including the following.
1. Taipei (three times)
2. Shen Zheng (3 times)
3. Hong Kong (two times)
4. Beijing (two times)
5. Singapore (1 time -- Visiting our partner there)
6. Shan-Hai (1 time)
Larry set off to complete several important missions:
1. Find and build a Shen Zheng location and get a few helpers to facilitate the future manufacturing needs.
2. Locate two to three major CNC factories for precise CNC manufacturing chassis [80% Done. Still working on delivery time and MOQ]
3. Locate LED screen providers [80% Done. Still working on delivery time and MOQ]
4. Locate the customized component provider. [Please refer to the update we posted for customized components]
5. Locate m.2 SATA vendor [Done]
6. Locate combo Optical SPDIF and Single-ended connector vendor
And yes, he found several good vendors and people who could work with and help. Please note: All PCB components (analog and digital) will be from the USA, Europe or Japan EXCEPT for the chassis, LEDs, and Battery M.2 SATA (and the combo SPDIF which is from Asia). We are not cheaping out!
We will keep adding more pictures here for our little SZ office. Here we'll post some pictures for this Asia trip first.
Picture 1: FANUC is world leading CNC machine provider. Our good Wave chassis manufacturer is using tons of these now. Picture shows 5 here. But there are three floors. Each of them cost a lot of $$$$.
Picture 2: Laser engraver. In super large size it could cut through the internal metal structure to create a good support of screen and battery inside Wave. Da Vinci will use this one too.
Picture 3: Another high speed CNC machine from another vendor. We are making multiple contacts to make sure quality and time.
Picture 4: One good sample of special customized connector on top of Wave RC1 board. High density and very low profile.
We also have a Vendor meeting picture! This was about the TQC procedure. [vendor named removed]
Other pictures: Randoms for your viewing pleasure. Including an anechoic chamber for isolation/audio testing purposes! Also - temperature testing machine [basically an oven]. This heats up the components and makes sure they withstand extreme heat.
We'll have more updates with pictures hopefully soon, including the China office!
