At last! We received the GollumRF pre-production batch!
And you know what? They’re working as expected, and thanks to the power amplifiers and external antenna we have seen a huge improvement in the RF performance over GollumRF Mini and its internal PCB antenna.
We also changed the Nordic BLE chip for a better package with 32KB RAM instead of 16 KB.
We replaced the LDO voltage regulator with an ultra low power one and gained 50 µA in standby, going from 87µA to 38µA. This means a reduction of more than 50%, which will allow the GollumRF to last at least 7 months in standby.
The external SPI memory has also been increased from 4 Mbits to 16 Mbits (mmmh more raw RF data to store…)
We will continue making more tests, especially on the RF performance and the FW update over the air. So far we’ve identified some minor issues: a few debug pins are wrongly mapped, and the silk screen has some typos.
And as a bonus, the batteries have arrived too! Again it will take a bit of charge/discharge testing and we should be good.
We are also about to start the final case design (hopefully since we use a standard case, there is only some CNC milling and painting to do).
So even if it’s not 100% sure, we are pretty confident we can ship at the end of 3Q16 🙂
We have also set up a referral program offering a cash reward for the clients who recommend GollumRF to their friends. We’ll tell you all about it soon.
Thanks again for your support and stay tuned!
