It’s time for another Game Bub manufacturing status update! But first:

Stay connected with us on Discord!

People keep asking if there’s a Game Bub Discord, so we’ve finally created one! Click the link to join it.

If you’d prefer not to use Discord, no pressure! We’ll keep posting official updates on Crowd Supply too.

Mold manufacturing underway

Since last time, we’ve been working to finalize the mechnical design for mold preparation. We’re happy to report that the design was finalized in January, and molds are in production!

Injection molding is a complicated process, and it takes weeks to machine the molds out of stainless steel. This intersects with the Lunar New Year holiday (later this month), so we don’t expect to get our first sample parts until later in March.

After we get the samples and verify that they’re up to our specifications and that everything fits together nicely, we’ll be able to proceed to mass production. We’ll send an update (with pictures, hopefully!) once we have more information.

We’ve also got some more good news! The original plan was for the Dock to be made out of high quality, 3D-printed PLA. However, since the campaign was so successful (thank you, everyone!) we were able to go ahead and do injection molding for the Dock, too! This will help make the Dock look and feel more premium.

As part of the validation process, we printed some SLA resin prints to check mechanical compatibility:

This photo looks almost identical to the enclosure shown off during the campaign. So you might be wondering, what took so long? Well, most of the changes were internal: making a wall thicker, making another wall thinner, redesigning a button to make it easier to eject from the mold, adjusting tolerances for a better fit, etc.

For example, the Handheld / Dock USB Type-C interface took hours of discussion over several days to nail down:

Laminated screen and battery pack

With the mechanical design finalized, we’ve also been able to proceed with samples for Game Bub’s laminated LCD screen and the dual-cell battery pack. Both of these samples should also be ready in March.

We’re really excited for the fully laminated LCD, and can’t wait to show it off in pictures soon.

A new contract manufacturer

You may have noticed that we’ve switched to using Elecrow for our final assembly process. As we were working through pre-manufacturing preparation, we came to the conclusion that our previous manufacturer wasn’t the best fit for Game Bub. We’ve been working with Elecrow since December of last year, however, and we believe that they’re the right choice for final assembly and packaging.

This change won’t cause any additional delays. In fact, it’s actually the opposite: most of the materials and subassembly suppliers were already located in China. With our previous manufacturer in Europe, all of these parts (molded plastic parts, LCDs, batteries, PCBs, etc.) would have to be sent first from China to Europe, taking a week or two for export clearance, transport, delivery, and customs.

Elecrow is located in Shenzhen, near all of these suppliers, which speeds up the whole manufacturing process. For example, we’ve already been able to go through multiple iterations of samples of a button component in just a few days. And when everything is finalized, and we proceed to mass production, we won’t have to worry as much about shipping delays impacting our timelines.

What are we working on now?

The next step in the Game Bub mass production journey is waiting for these final samples, so we’ve got some more time right now to polish the 1.0 release of the Game Bub firmware. There’s other auxiliary work to be done too, like writing the user guide and safety information, and we’re trying to get as much of this out of the way before mass production.

Until then, feel free to join our Discord to stay in touch!