Librem 14 - Annoying high-pitched electrical noise

[craftkiller]

@bert

I cannot understand how you can ship a product like that

Its easy, purism barely tested the product before rushing it out the door. They admitted to it during soldergate in this post:

that’s what we tested for during development, we tested functionality and stability. Does everything work as expected? Even when we stress test it? And it did.

But there is more to it than just function, we also e.g. have to comply to regulations, like FCC and CE concerning EM interference and a lot of other things that are not related to functionality.

We also talked about another problem before and that is time. Due to the global shortage of parts we really got into trouble concerning time. If there is just a single component missing you can not make the main board, end of story. So you have to wait. This caused a lot of delays compared to the original production plan. And this also meant that the usual sequential development process had to be squeezed together and we had to do things in parallel in order to avoid even further delays. This of course incurred some risk, e.g. that findings from one “branch” might not make it into the other in time.

And that’s exactly what happened here. Please take into account that depending on load it takes four weeks or more to make a production run of such main boards. If you need to change things it takes even a lot longer. Since we were already super late we took the risk and pulled production of PCBs in front of the time line to get a step ahead. Since we tested the EVT and PVT boards thoroughly for function we were pretty sure that we should be pretty fine with them.