Preparation for industrial production DO-RA

1. Transportation of Samples

The project DO-RA DO-RA.com was born in March 2011 after the nuclear accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan and was conceived as a gadget - a personal dosimeter-radiometer working with the same software - DO-RA.Soft on any smartphone for mobile platforms : iOS, Android, WP, etc., as well as on stationary platforms: Windows / Linux / MacOS.
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At the end of 2017, a dozen long-awaited samples of the test batch, DO-RA.Q, made on the basis of our design documentation (CD) in China arrived in a backpack of a Chinese tourist from Shenzhen to Moscow. By the way, CD was then commissioned to develop the largest Design Center in Eastern Europe - the company PROMVAD. Everything was done clearly, in IPC format, in good English, including for robotic production of electronic products abroad.

Our gadgets for smartphones arrived from China earlier, stubbornly refused to carry air carriers, as they were lithium-ion batteries. However, these batteries are on any modern device, which we are surrounded in everyday life and do not worry.

As it is known, the restrictions of mass shipments of lithium-ion batteries and batteries were introduced by ICAO * as early as April 1, 2016. Then all air carriers were obliged to carry out the delivery of such goods only by transport aircraft, due to the allegedly increased fire danger of batteries. Although the statistically real probability of such a fire is close to zero on the background of the mass use of this technology in electronic engineering.

It is good that when transported by a private person for such devices, any restrictions are usually powerless.

* ICAO is a UN specialized agency, the protocol on the recognition of which was signed on October 1, 1947 and entered into force on May 13, 1948. ICAO is an international governmental organization. Initially, after the signing of the Chicago Convention, the Provisional International Civil Aviation Organization (PICAO) existed.

2. Errors of Chinese piece production

In the hands of a specialist developer, any thing can come to life, even if it is incorrectly unsoldered and almost “killed”. It happened in our case with the Chinese DO-RA.Q prototypes.

First, an incorrect resistance rating was detected, 10 times larger, and already soldered on the printed circuit boards of our products. For this reason, no device was launched in principle. Further, a type of Zener diode, which does not correspond to CD, was detected, which is installed in the electronic circuit and limits, according to the design logic, the operating voltage of the ionizing radiation detector.

On top of that, in one of the samples of the DO-RA.Q device, the printed circuit board was overheated due to visual signs, as a result of which the microcontroller installed on the board became roasted and partially lost its calculated performance and, unlike other samples, “slowed” two times slower judging by the clock frequency. Alas, all this is the human factor!

On the other hand, we thought that the inadvertent overheating of the microcontroller led to extreme "climate" testing of our product. This fact showed us the vitality of our gadget with serious thermal splash when working in an aggressive environment.

3. Russian manufacturer DO-RA

In mid-2018, Intersoft Eurasia, the operator of the DO-RA project, intersofteurasia.ru, at one of the domestic electronics exhibitions, met the Russian production partner-investor, represented by Sarapulsky Radiozavod, with a license agreement for mass production of DO RA: in 2018, up to 12,000 pcs. and in 2019 up to 120 thousand. various modifications. It is worth noting that this is the oldest radio engineering enterprise in Russia.

The history of the Sarapul radio plant srzudm.ru began in 1900 in St. Petersburg, where the German citizen Otto Treplin founded an assembly enterprise, which from German components manufactured products sold on the Russian market. Plant "K. Lorets "successfully engaged in the production of mass telegraph and telephone equipment.

In 1914, as a result of the beginning of the 1st World War, the plant was sequestered and transferred to the subordination of the Main Military Technical Directorate. During this period, the company manufactured Morse telegraph devices, outpost telephones, and repaired a huge amount of military communications equipment coming in a continuous stream from the front.

With the beginning of World War II, a new page is opened in the eventful biography of the Sarapulsky radio plant. On November 28, 1941 Moscow Electromechanical Plant No. 203 was evacuated to the city of Sarapul. Having organized its production in a short time of wartime, as early as February 1942, the Sarapulsky Radio Works began mass production of radio equipment for the front.

In Sarapul, we promptly designed and manufactured molds for the DO-RA.Q version cases, purchased the main electronic components from Russian manufacturers and produced the first installation batch of 150 pcs. It turned out that in terms of component base and skilled labor, we began to look more profitable than the Chinese. And taking into account the Russian mentality, the lack of a language barrier and customs procedures in the DO-RA production cycle, unnecessary barriers have disappeared.

4. User Software Verification

Before launching a test batch of any electronic products prior to industrial production, all aspects of the future product are thoroughly tested: circuit design, reliability of electronic components, mechanical and temperature susceptibility to overloads, other loads on the product being launched into production. With such tests, an important task is to work out the reliability of the operation, firmware and user applications. After all, if something after the start of sales will start to fail in the hands of the user, you will not end up with reclamations.

First in the software test chain, we have the mobile iOS form. Historically, our first product DO-RA.Soft for a line of devices under a single brand DO-RA began with it.

Some time ago we had a rational idea - to switch to the universal platform “Corona”, which allows working freely on mobile platforms: iOS and Android. However, there is nothing eternal under the Moon - the company that creates the universal product under the brand “Corona”, unfortunately, lost its distance, having lost its investor exactly before the new 2019 year.

5. Testing under iOS

The first “jamb” when programming was found as always, not in the error code of the user application DO-RA.Soft, but in the usual contact of the explorer connector to charge the device from the computer’s USB port when our leading iOS encoder Vadim Bashurov started his manipulations with the device . Thereby once again confirming one of the truths of electronics: It's all about contact!

It should be noted that at the beginning of the project back in 2011, an iOS application was written in Objective-C, which is very understandable to coders around the world. All libraries in this language were written in advance, all the functionality was laid out in the user application DO-RA.Soft.

However, scientific and technological progress does not stand still, and as if on cue, the entire programmer world began to switch to Swift ** 2.0, then to 3.0, 4.0, and finally to 5.0! The most difficult transition was from Swift 2.0 to 3.0 when dramatic changes took place. By the way, currently Apple does not recommend using the AudioUnit library since version 7.0, encouraging coders to learn new programming languages, but there is still no formal ban on Obj-C, because a lot of software resources still have applications at the core of Objective-C .

Of course, some time was lost for testing DO-RA.Q, and the problems found were instantly entered into the CD of the device, for the manufacturer about the audio jack standard and for coders about the signal transmission system from the device to the smartphone.

So, because of the relatively high noise of the radiation detector in the form of a Geiger-Muller counter, programmers and circuit engineers have another problem on the horizon - how to measure the natural background of the Earth. That is, the range of ionizing radiation: 0.1 to 0.35 μSv / h, which is included in the green comfort zone due to radiation. Programmers and circuit engineers have solved this problem by the method of successive brainstorming.

** Swift - (pronounced [swɪft]) is a multi-paradigm object-oriented programming language created by Apple for developers of iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS. Swift works with Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks and is compatible with Apple’s core codebase, written in Objective-C.

6. Testing for Android

One of the tasks of the DO-RA project, in terms of visual event logging with reference to geolocation, was to “hook” the camera support for taking photos from the Android DO-RA application. The matter was complicated by the fact that it was necessary to upload a custom application not only to the Google Play store, but also to the Samsung branded market.

This is how the process of validation of software applications is arranged, as in the Samsung store the user software underwent a preliminary check, and only if all is well, went to the publication. At this stage, we had to suffer with the support of many different models of smartphones, purchased specifically for testing DO-RA software during the period of work on the Skolkovsky grant. From a huge box, where there were up to hundreds of different devices, sharpened under: iOS, WP, TIZEN, antiquarian: Bada, Symbian Java ME, we had to dig out the right one running on the Android mobile platform.

However, most of the devices have never been sold in Russia (and possibly outside of Korea). Some had only a front camera, and when they tried to choose another, the application immediately fell. Samsung provided access to a pool of devices for remote debugging, but when the camera was turned on, nothing was visible (probably the devices were in cases or were in a dark room).

In 2018, Google announced that publishing new apps and updates to Google Play is possible only if the application is compiled with targetSdkVersion 26 (Android 8). I had to urgently add permission requests from the user, modify the service and notifications.

As a result, the main problems of the DO-RA project were overcome, now we will wait for feedback from users using our devices in everyday life.

To be continued…