Here is the Email from the Spark Team:
Hi Everybody,
Our team on 3 continents has been working hard to get your the Photon of your dreams this spring. However we have run into a PCB issue that has caused a short delay in our first run. This means that delivery will now be at the end of April. We're disappointed about this too, but we want to make sure we deliver a fantastic product that is great as it can be.
Keep in mind that we won't charge your credit card for Photons until we ship, so if you don't want to wait around for a few extra weeks, you can cancel anytime.
Specifically, we've run into some delays optimizing our RF (radio frequency) design and those delays have been compounded by the shut down of many of our partners for the Chinese New Year. For those of you interested in the process of building connected hardware, we wanted to provide some more details on our RF design and optimization process.
RF DESIGN & OPTIMIZATION
One of the improvements we made for the Photon was to include both a chip antenna and u.FL connector on every board, and to allow users to choose between the two with a simple software command. This is made possible by the addition of a nifty new component called a “RF switch”, which does exactly what you’d think—switches between antenna inputs.
RF Design boards for the Photon
RF design is tricky though, and the Photon’s range and signal strength can be affected dramatically by small design decisions—component values and orientations, and even the shape and thickness of the copper traces that connect them. In order to make the Photon perfect, we’ve been working with ACX, an international antenna supplier and RF expert, to optimize the antenna design of the Photon.
The most recent optimization results we received were a mix of good and bad news. The good news: it works! It already performs better than the Spark Core. The bad(ish): it could be better. In response, we’re making some small tweaks that we hope will further improve the RF performance of the Photon, but will delay shipment a couple of weeks while we wait for the new optimization and component pairing results from our antenna manufacturer.
Early run of Photon boards for testing
Early Access for Time Sensitive Projects
We do realize that some of you have extremely tight deadlines to hit and need a Photon immediately. To that end, we are going to some great lengths to make a limited number of Photons available early. These will allow for early testing and prototyping however will be without a number of bells and whistles that will accompany the actual release.
If you're interested, please fill out this form with your contact information, details on your project and notes about your timeline needs.
Thank you again for your support and continued excitement for the Photon; we can't wait to deliver what is promising to be an epic product.
Zach and the Spark Team