Quote Originally Posted by jwatte View Post
Trossen does not have a factory in-house. They, like most other people who sell electronics, contract the manufacture of their electronics boards to electronics manufacturers (colloquially called "board stuffers.")
From the board stuffers, you will typically actually get a fully assembled and sealed box -- board + static bag + collateral/inserts + box + sealing.
If they were to test each board, they'd have to open each box, break the seals, open the anti-static bags, and then test the boards.
But, that's something they already paid the board stuffers/factory to do! Part of the manufacturing plan is a testing plan.
From what I know of that business, it's likely the factory somehow failed to run the proper quality controls, and Trossen was left with a bad batch. While they may sample a board or two out of a batch (opening them, meaning they can't then be sold as "new") that could easily miss a defect rate of 10, or 20, or even 50%.
I hear you, and when i said "they" - that could obviously be part of what the board stuffers do as part of the manufacturing.

I guess I am just sort of spoiled by PJRC with the teensy boards. I know that they have test jigs for each of their boards and each board is tested to make sure all IO pins are connected and that they can program the boards with a blink program... I believe they also for example test things like the TFT displays the bulk order and the like.

What would be interesting to know, is what are the failures? Is there some component that is not working or something as simple as someone forgot to program the boards? With AVR boards I would suggest trying to hook up a programmer to them and see if you can talk to them, as they are pretty cheap and you can setup another Arduino board to do it... But with these boards, the programmer and adapter connections cost something like: $50... Sure wish they had put some form of bootloader on them!