Serious work on the final stages of the Mirakey project is beginning this week. The designs for both the embedded keycap PCB and the main macropad PCB have been finalized, and quotes are being obtained from PCB manufacturers. We are hoping to have PCBs in our hands within a few weeks, however the week-long Chinese New Year's celebrations may have an impact on the turn-around time for our PCB designs. We're looking at a few different options for manufacturing the case and keycaps for the macropad. One of the PCB manufacturers we are considering, JLC, also offers SLA resin 3D printing which may be more cost effective than getting our printing done at WaTiMake. We will have to get quotes from both and see which one meets our time and cost constraints. In our preliminary investigations into PCB costs, we found that the cost of getting PCB assembly done by the manufacturer can add a significant premium to the cost, which is something we have to consider carefully. We would be exhausting a large portion of our budget to get this done from the manufacturer, but it would potentially save a lot of time.
On the topic of time, there is roughly 5 or so weeks left until we need a working prototype in our hands. Provided that the PCB manufacturing can be done in time, things are looking good for us to hit this goal in time. We will likely start some preliminary work on the firmware side of things as soon as this week or the next.
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