Production hardware is rolling off the lines and looking good! I know we’ve shown a few different colors for the early QuadRF PCBAs, and some people have been confused about what they’ll get. Well as Henry Ford said, it comes in every color you want, as long as it’s black!
Besides appearance, these production boards also had a few final tweaks made including a better power saving mode when transmit is off, improved layout for EMC (we are doing testing soon at Compatible Electronics in Los Angeles, which is especially needed for shipping to our EU customers). There are a few capacitor changes, final component/supplier choices, and labeling additions. Bring up progressed well and we’re looking forward to including these in pilot full kit assembly runs.
Accessories Are Coming in
It’s not just the main RF PCBs that have a sleek new look. The final kit tripods, cables, microSD cards, and a few other items are being produced.
We think this will give QuadRF a much more coherent look, because yes, we care about coherencey over here! 😉
It’s a detail, but we’re really happy with the custom MIPI FPC connectors. These are made of flex PCB Kapton/polyimide material, have gold contacts, and are far more robust than your typical tin-plated FFC cables. Given these are our workhorse cables for data transfer, we wanted to get them right. The last few components including the injection molded front enclosure are coming soon so we can show off the final QuadRF Kit with everything together!
UI Development
While we’ve been waiting on some of our accessory suppliers, we’ve also been improving the software. One user interface update addresses how beamforming is controlled. Instead of fiddling with raw antenna phase values, we now render the instantaneous direction the beam is pointing. This updates automatically when enabling Auto Steer, but you can also drag the beam around to adjust by hand. We think this is a lot more intuitive. You can also independently steer the Tx beam, but in many instances you’ll want to use the "lock to Rx" feature where the Tx beam automatically matches the Rx direction. Incidentally, because we have four antennas, you can control more than just beam azimuth and elevation angles, there is a control for beam curvature or depth which can be adjusted between near-field and far-field. When automatic beamforming is enabled, this actually gives you a basic sense of how far away the transmitter is from the QuadRF!
Of course the code for all this is open source, so you can see exactly how everything is calculated and transformed between the raw four phases and az/el/depth.
QuadRF in the Wild
You may be starting to spot a QuadRF out and about. One of our advisors, Kieran Levin (a Director at Framework, that upgradable laptop we all love), took it to Open Sauce last weekend and drew a crowd of interest. Lots of good ideas and discussions were sparked as well. Of course the Crowd Supply crowd has an even greater opportunity this weekend to get your hands on these at Teardown. We’ll be sure to let you know of other events as well. The calendar is moving quickly, and soon enough we’ll be shipping these direct to your mailbox!