Welcome to another Kokoon update. In our last update, we had received our first mass produced parts from the factory and were preparing to build our first units. This time, we’ll be looking at how the first manufactured units came together and performed, as well as looking at the shipping schedule ahead.
Manufacturing update
We talked last time about the progress we’ve made with mass manufacture and the setup of our production line. Our factory have taken many steps forward since then and we’re proud to show the results.
Headphones!
We have completed our first run of headphones and they have been through rigorous testing (more on that later). Below are a few more photos of the manufacturing process at the factory.
White headphone assembly
Many of our flex PCBs
Checking our assembly instructions are correct!
We’ve talked in previous updates about the testing that units from this batch would need to go through before they’re ready to ship out. There is more information on that below but, in summary, the performance has been good with only some small challenges to solve.
Testing update
It’s important to put this final mass manufactured design through rigorous testing to ensure it meets our specification. Whilst there has been extensive testing on various prototype units throughout the process, we have to be confident that mass manufactured units meet standards. There are many different tests, we’ll cover just a couple below.
Headband force testing is required to ensure our headband would not bend out of shape with continual use. We use a manganese/steel alloy headband and, with the use of a force probe, we were able to demonstrate very small plastic deformation when bending. This is great news, as it means the headband will hold it’s shape and won’t go floppy after a lot of use.
Headband force testing!
We have also been testing the headband extenders, which you can see in the photo below. This test uses a force probe to pull on the extender, to find the force at which it breaks. This test was repeated multiple times and we found the headphone’s break force is between 50-100N, which is within the limits we require.
This one reached over 90n before breaking
Many other tests are taking place, including twisting of the headphones to ensure they are reliable, as well as a variety of audio tests, Bluetooth testing, ANC testing and much more.
Compliance ‘Pre-scan’ Test Results
Full safety certification and product compliance is a formal process that can take up to a month to complete, so, during the development phase of a product ‘pre-scans’ or ‘pre-compliance tests’ are completed to give a team a high confidence level that the product will pass, before committing to the formal certification testing process.
As part of our pre-compliance testing, we completed a pre-scan for our RF/ESD compliance requirements. During the course of this testing unfortunately we failed some of the thresholds for RF radiated emissions (<1GHz and >1GHz) and had an ESD (electrostatic discharge) strike failure.
ESD(Electro-Static Discharge) testing. This was a 4kV test on an external connector.
Whilst this is a setback, we have already addressed the issue by making appropriate changes. We are soon to re-test the device with the changes that our team have made and hope to report successful results soon.
An example of RF emission results failures
Schedule update
As mentioned above, you can see from our testing results, the headphones have failed a small subset of the design verification tests that they have completed. We have had to schedule an additional set of testing to be completed in December to test the component changes we have already made to address the issues and this has unfortunately impacted shipping dates. We are now aiming to ship the first units out for external testing at the end of this month. We’re sorry to have to announce this slip in our timeline.
We will then begin fulfilling a large number of orders in January, aiming to get at as many shipped before Chinese New Year as possible. We’re working with our factory to understand how many this will be, a number that’s partly affected by how quickly we can complete all our tests.
We will be in touch with customers individually when your headphones are ready to ship. Due to shipping times and local customs, it may take longer for customers in some regions to receive their headphones.
That’s all for now, we hope you enjoyed reading. Thank you again for your continued patience with Kokoon. We appreciate a further slip won’t be welcome news, but we hope that you can see from the progress in this update that your headphones are nearly ready, we are excited to be so close!
As always, we love hearing from you either through email or our social media channels Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Best wishes,
The Kokoon Team
