manufacturing

Factory test

We're doing the factory runs in batches, since there are multiple configurations of boards. Every board that leaves the factory will start out life as a "bare board", and will have features added to it later on. The factory test itself serves to do two things: Test the board, and load the board's firmware image. Since the firmware is so large and we have multiple cores, the task of writing the firmware is done in the background throughout the test as an "

Desktop Factory Test

We've just shipped the desktop factory test off to the assembly line, and they'll soon begin the process of turning bare boards into desktop models. We ran the initial factory test -- the one I mentioned earlier -- on every board we produced. This first test ensures that the board is assembled correctly, has its own MAC address assigned, and has a root filesystem image. This test performed well, and actually caught an assembly error that prevented the Ethernet test from running.