Delay
Bad news first to "rip the bandaid off":
Hi all, unfortunately the GameTanks will not be shipping in July due to EMC-related revisions taking much longer than anticipated. I should have announced this earlier, but had waited, because I wanted to give a more concrete projection as to the new expected shipping timeline.
Two months ago, I got the news that I the sample unit I had sent to the lab was producing radiated and conducted radio frequency emissions in excess of the regulatory limits. The cartridge flasher had passed its test on the first try, so I got a bit overconfident about the ease with which I could resolve the emissions on the main unit.
After seeking advice from other electronics makers, I designed another version of the console boards and ordered them assembled from PCBWay. They took a little more than a month to arrive.
To gauge the likeliness that it would pass when sent to the lab, I performed comparative pre-compliance testing at home with a spectrum analyzer, nearfield probes, and a TEM cell.
I couldn’t replicate the lab conditions, so I used a copy of the sample I’d previously sent to the lab as a baseline. While the new prototype had largely improved, some of the frequencies called out in the lab report had not decreased at all. I couldn’t confidently send this prototype back to the lab for retesting.
Old:
First Revision:
From there I worked several sleepless nights trying different modifications and testing their results. I tried shielding the boards, but the shield would act as an antenna and make the emissions worse. I tried adding bypass capacitors and series resistors in all sorts of places and would get only minor changes.
After further study, I reasoned that something was wrong in a way that I couldn’t just manually rework the test board to fix it. I added extra ground planes to the motherboard bringing it to 6 layers, and used analysis software to locate areas of both boards that potentially needed extra ground connections.
This results in the boards I received on Friday, and tested over the weekend. These have given extremely promising results on both the conducted and radiated scans.
The hopeful new timeline breaks down as follows, if the new PCB grounding changes have had the desired effect:
- This week, I mail the new test sample back out to Sunfire Testing, which advertises a three-week turnaround time.
- In three weeks, if I get a passing result from the lab, I can instruct Soldered Electronics to begin manufacturing units. They give an eight week estimate from start to ship.
In total this adds up to an expected 11-12 weeks. Given the original ship dates were about a week from now, I wish I’d shared this earlier, even if I didn’t have as much information.
Currently, I’m working on this project full-time and am fully committed to getting GameTanks out to backers as soon as possible. I’ll be sharing weekly status updates from here until shipping.
Custom Packaging
Earlier, while waiting for new boards to be fabricated with EMC-related revisions, I turned to sourcing parts of the build unrelated to the electronics. Like with the controller and cartridges, I wanted the box to contribute to the GameTank’s sense of identity. I had an idea somewhat inspired by the classic "cow pattern" Gateway computer boxes, and created a pattern using volumetric shader nodes in Blender. Eventually, I arrived at the paint-splattered, warped grid aesthetic pictured. If you look at the corners, you can see the pattern is consistent, because it’s actually a slice from a 3D voxel field!
Featured on What’s Ken Making
Just this week, Ken at What’s Ken Making released a wonderfully produced video building the through-hole version of the GameTank showing the build process and gives a technical breakdown of the core system features. If you like looking at big DIP chips and soldering closeups check it out!
