So, who knows Sparkfun? You guys probably all know SparkFun. You've ordered stuff from Sparkfun for your different projects. I just got my LED thing working last weekend, so it was great. So, chips LED back and forth and it emits sound and it's pretty cool. A penny little Arduino bar I got from Sparkfun. So, what happened? So, I spoke with the owner of Sparkfun about this on the phone and he pointed me to this link, you can still follow that link and go read about it. So, here's the summary of what happens. So, they shipped just under 2,000 of these MicroView boards without a bootloader. Of course, when the customers got them, they didn't do anything because there was no bootloader. They didn't do anything. What's an encoder? I think, there was no way to get code into it from the customer's perspective. It caused Sparkfun $58,000 to remedy this. What did Sparkfun do? I applaud them. If you go read this article, you'll see all of this information there. So, they got on top of this immediately. They were proactive. They didn't pretend that there wasn't a problem. They didn't tell customers to call back later or anything like that. They immediately began to take action. So, they contacted all of the affected customers. They sent new and fixed units to each of the affected customer. So, they've pretty much got two units for the price of one. They never asked for those other ones back. They helped customers with the broken units to fix them and keep the broken units. They didn't have to do that. They did. They explained to their customers right away up front what happened. That's the whole part of being proactive when there's an issue when a boo boo happened. They shared what they learned from this experience. I don't have to ask you that question because it's on the next slide here. So, what they learn? They learned that no matter how much it costs, make things right with your customers. So, sometimes it's called goodwill, being right by your customer. On the manufacturing side, if you go read that article, you'll see that they changed the production firmware mid-run. So they were in the middle of manufacturing a batch of boards and they change the firmware image mid-run and that changed the firmware, somehow the bootloader got left out of the code and that's how the bootloader became absent. So, their key learning is whatever you do, don't change your production firmware mid-run. I totally concur with that because we do a lot of testing both in the SSD world, and my current employer and my past employer, and once we start manufacturing, we got to be very, very careful about changing the image that goes into those drives. Generally, what you want to do is you want to have a very, very solid image that's been very, very well tested. Whatever your volume run is, if it's 500 or 5,000 or 10 million, you just want to manufacture all those parts with the same firmware image. Worry about updating the firmware later in the field. So, there's mechanisms in place to update the firmware and all kinds of things. Printers, hard drives, and Iclicker boxes, probably there is a way to update the firmware in there. Test the bootloader during manufacturing. That was a step that they were not doing during their manufacturing process. It makes sense to test the bootloader during manufacturing. Yes? Do you know what percentage of these devices were actually defective? You said there were 1,900, that didn't have a bootloader? But how many did they actually send out in total, do you know? I don't know. I didn't write that number down. It might be in the link of what the total run rate was. I don't have that number. They were in a place in their development when this happened as Sparkfun was growing and developing and becoming a larger company. They were moving from low-volume production to mid-volume production. They discovered that mid-volume production requires a very different approach. As your volumes go up, you get out in the working world. I don't want to go into all that right now. It takes a lot of additional effort as your volumes increase. There's just a lot more that needs to be done. They were applying low-volume production mindset to what owner refers to as mid-volume of production process.
