Hello to all our supporters of Qi Aerista!

Here's our bi-weekly update to our wonderful backers. We are sorry for the delay in publishing this update due to manufacturing visits and prototyping activities over the past several days. 

We have worked closely with the Innozen design team and our manufacturing partners over the past 2 weeks and we are glad we have completed the mechanical design work according to schedule. We are getting meticulous in designing our parts in preparation for our mass production stage (see below example). 

Here's a sneak peek at the mechanical design of 3 generations of Qi Aerista (L-earliest, M-current, R-newest). Our newest design features the following:

• Much more maturely defined mechanical structure ready for mass production
• Distinctive lid, handle and base profile (masked due to confidentiality reasons)
• Cleaner and simpler user interface
• Lower height (~20mm)

We are evaluating quotation from a couple of prototype shops to proceed with prototyping of our newest design. We have already placed the order for the glass shell which usually requires a longer lead time. We expect to have a fully functional prototype in early August.

We have visited our manufacturing partner's factory several days ago and discussed in detail our new ID/mechanical design. They will provide us with an updated quote based on the new information and we will proceed with talks on tooling and manufacturing when our prototype is ready and fully tested. 

At the assembly lines we saw workers busy piecing together glass kettle products to be shipped overseas. We can't wait to see Qi Aerista coming off the same assembly lines ready to be shipped to our backers and other customers very soon. 

In addition, we have discussed with 2 more established PCBA manufacturers who can provide end-to-end support for our PCBA, firmware and even app development. We will confirm our PCBA manufacturer selection as soon as we collect all the quote estimation and other necessary information from our candidate partners. 

In the next 2 weeks we will see:     

- Working with our main manufacturing partner for updated product quotation and preparation for mass production

- Fabrication, assembly and testing of our newest prototype

- Discussions with PCBA manufacturers on new PCBA & firmware design for our new ID  

- Preparation for app upgrade

Together we are making Qi Aerista a reality!  

____________________     

Cheers,  

Rick @ Qi Aerista