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PayPalLooks like dbrand are not having a great time with Project Killswitch, their bundle of accessories as they had to pull it from sale shortly after going up for reservations due to it causing problems.
It was a little confusing, as a reservation holder myself the link in the email to buy it just ended up going to a Twitter post. Confused, I reached out to dbrand but didn't hear back until their public announcement about what happened. Sent in an email and posted in public on Reddit too, they made a "Million-Dollar Mistake".
They shipped out a bunch of them to various content creators and news websites (not to us though…) which they said had people whose knowledge "ranged from 'casual' to 'built their own Linux distro'" and all seemed fine. Then they shipped some out to The Verge, who emailed back to note there were problems with the magnetic kickstand and the Steam Deck fan. It was slowing down their Steam Deck fan! After more testing, another unit saw their fan speed-up.
In short, the whiney Delta fan was the one affected, the Huaying was not and according to dbrand they've heard that Valve are apparently no longer using the Delta fan. So this is why they pulled the launch, as their magnets screwed with any Steam Deck with a Delta fan and obviously they can't just let that happen. To be clear, everything else is fine, just the kickstand causes issues.
So now they're going back and changing the kickstand to a "mechanical interlock system", which will probably end up a little like the fantastic DeckMate. Everyone who purchased it with the magnetic version will get a "free replacement of both their case and kickstand" which is great to see.
It's going to take a while though, with any new orders now not shipping until sometime Q1 2023, but they will still be shipping out orders of those reservation holders who did manage to get through initially.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
slaapliedje Sep 30, 2022
Quoting: anewsonnice of the verge to do dbrand's job for themI got the email detailing out the whole thing. Literally just randomly was someone at The Verge happened to turn on the performance setting all the way up to be able to see the fan speed and wondered what was going on. dbrand still couldn't reproduce it, and then a bunch of back and forth and the discovery of the different brands of fans came down. So this is more on Valve than it is dbrand. No one but Valve is going to know how many units were shipped that had the worse fan.
slaapliedje Oct 1, 2022
Quoting: GuestValve could have known who had gotten the Delta fans and let the customers know at least.Quoting: slaapliedjeQuoting: anewsonnice of the verge to do dbrand's job for themI got the email detailing out the whole thing. Literally just randomly was someone at The Verge happened to turn on the performance setting all the way up to be able to see the fan speed and wondered what was going on. dbrand still couldn't reproduce it, and then a bunch of back and forth and the discovery of the different brands of fans came down. So this is more on Valve than it is dbrand. No one but Valve is going to know how many units were shipped that had the worse fan.
It's on both companies as dbrand should have done more in-house testing and Valve shouldn't have used the Delta fan.
I got my Killswitch today and it is phenomenal, by the way!
The coil in a fan produces multiple electro magnets. The coil is suspended between physical magnets of opposite polarity. When current is fed to the coil, the magnetic repulsion causes the motion. If you introduce an extra magnet in the vicinity, it will affect the magnetic field, and should affect the speed of the fan. If the dbrand is using a strong magnet, the greater the chance of affecting the magnetic field in the fan.
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