Originally published at: Mycroft selects Aztech - Mycroft
Mycroft and Aztech enter agreement for global scale manufacturing
The big decision has been made! Mycroft has selected Aztech to be our design partner and contract manufacturer for the production Mark II. Singapore based Aztech is a global leader in consumer electronics manufacturing and was chosen from several strong candidates in a rigorous six month vetting process.
Aztech was selected because they were very responsive, went above and beyond in assessing the Mark II manufacturing requirements and clearly demonstrated their competencies and enthusiasms.
Aztech has been in business for over 34 years servicing consumer electronics, telecommunications, healthtech, LED lighting, automotive and technology startup market segments. They are a turnkey, integrated solutions provider with state of the art equipment, R&D, design, manufacturing, and packaging services. The Mark II will be produced in their Malaysia manufacturing plant.
Our next step is kicking off production planning with Aztech. Early steps will include optimizing the Mark II consumer device’s design with Aztech for consistent, quality manufacturing, designing the molds for the plastics and developing product test plans.
We’ve also made progress on untangling the global supply chain and now have orders in with vendors for the longest lead time parts. Assuming no surprises, we expect to have all parts for NPI and the first production run by Q2 2022. That may sound like a long time out, but it is much better than original quotes from suppliers whose own supply chains have been snarled by COVID. The key driver on timing continues to be part availability, but we are regularly checking with suppliers to make sure that parts show up on time.
Development
Kris Gesling, Mycroft Community Relations Manager, recently published an update on Development. The update includes information on the recent release of a new version of mycroft-core, version 21.2.1. As its name suggests this is the code that brings together all the technologies to make Mycroft an end-to-end voice interaction system. The update includes information on:
- XDG Compliance
- Farsi Support
- Browser improvements
- Testing improvements
If you have not read the update, be sure to check it out!