Manufacturing Process Preparation

One year ago, on May 13th, 2015, we pushed the Light Phone live on Kickstarter, and a year later we were enjoying our last meal with our engineering team during our recent trip to China where we completed the Light Phone DVT build (Design Validation Test). It has been a truly amazing year and we are forever grateful for your support.

DVT Build

The DVT units have been submitted for FCC/PTCRB/CEC certification and we expect it to go smoothly as we’ve been testing accordingly for months.

Tools
Every major plastic component needs a physical stainless steel injection molding tool. A part injected from the tools will have a residual attached, this is called the “gate” and it is where the injection flowed into the mold. The debating process of removing the gate is accomplished by CNC machines and various polishing machines to ensure that humans aren’t exposed to the dust that will accumulate in doing so at scale. The most important thing for us to pay attention to is the parting lines and sink marks and we’ve done a great job at controlling those common cosmetic defects.

Assembly Line Testing
Another big goal of the DVT build is to continue to iterate on the assembly line process, which for the Light Phone is not so simple. Our engineers from Taiwan all came to Yantai and spent 4 weeks teaching our operators and making modifications and improvements to the process. There are about 15 different stations in the assembly process for the Light Phone, and each station might take a slightly different length of time to complete its task, so we work to optimize the chain for efficiency.

OLED
The biggest challenge of our DVT build is optimizing the color temperature of our OLED display to perfectly match the LED Keypad below. The way an OLED module is manufactured leaves room for variations in lighting color that ranges from warm white to cool white. However subtle that variation is, it is too wide for the Light Phone. Our optical engineers have worked relentlessly with us in trying a variety of solutions like using different films under the glass to adjust the color temperature of the OLED which has been quite promising so far. We have a couple more tests to do before we ramp up to our mass production.

Battery
To achieve the thickness of the phone we originally designed, we had to customize our battery to be as thin as possible. The cost of making the custom battery as well as the M.O.Q. (minimum order quantity) were both extremely high, but we knew keeping to the form factor was crucial.

We have been testing our battery consumption with hardware and software prototypes, and are now in the final stage where our design is nearly locked down. Our latest test results shows up to about a week of standby time and up to a few hours of talk time.