80HE Update - Major Manufacturing Delay

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The estimated delivery date of the 80HE has been pushed back 6 weeks for all regions and all batches due to a problem discovered during the manufacturing process.

Your Wooting Hub has been updated with the new date that your order is expected to deliver to your front door, based on your specific fulfilment region and shipping method.https://hub.wooting.io

What happened?‍

‍In short, a critical IC part has a high level of defects. This in and of itself isn't a huge problem, as each keyboard gets tested multiple times during the manufacturing process. However, while investigating this problem, we discovered that keyboards could pass all of the checks during manufacturing and then still fail after it has been packaged and prepared for shipment.

This means that some of the keyboards could be packed up at the factory in a working condition, but by the time it delivers to you, it's dead on arrival. This is absolutely unacceptable, and therefore production was completely halted until we can get this figured out.

How will we fix it?

Replacement IC parts are en route to the factory, and manufacturing will start back up as early as next week. Due to the nature of the PCBA production process, especially the water-resistant coating process, as well as the sheer volume of keyboards getting produced, it will take up to 6 weeks for all of the keyboards to get produced.

There is a chance that the keyboards we've already manufactured can get reworked to replace the current IC part with a new one. If so, this would speed up the timeframe. However, this needs to get validated before we can confidently consider that as part of the delivery estimate.

Our commitments to you

Wooting is committed to producing the highest quality products we can. While this delay is both significant and frustrating, we believe that getting it right the first time is more important than getting it done quickly.

If you disagree with our decision, or your patience has run out, we understand. If you wish to cancel your pre-order, you can do so for a full refund any time prior to the order getting submitted for fulfilment. To do so, reach out via the Wooting Hub's contact us page or email social@wooting.io

‍Our current focus is to ensure that the production can continue as soon as possible. You can be sure that we will be checking, double-checking, and triple checking the replacement IC parts to ensure that they will function as expected for years and years to come.

At the same time, we are conducting a thorough root cause analysis and will share the results of our investigations in a deep-dive blog post at a later date.