Librem 5 Birch’s 10kΩ Resistor Fun, Devices Prepping for Shipping

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Todd Weaver

Founder and CEO
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Latest posts by Todd Weaver (see all)

• Purism Differentiator Series, Part 14: Surveillance Capitalism - April 23, 2024
• Purism Differentiator Series, Part 13: Modularity & Right to Repair - April 23, 2024
• Purism Differentiator Series, Part 12: Secure Supply Chain and Made in USA Electronics - April 22, 2024

Purism is working to solve no shortage of problems; making a phone with a never-before used CPU for mobile, to authoring a mobile OS, to designing the hardware from scratch. Not to forget forging a social purpose company, avoiding toxic funding, and solving digital civil rights by creating products that are convenient to use and look good. All because of your continued support.

Many of our customers are interested in what goes on behind the scenes when making a phone, so we wanted to share for transparency the kinds of issues that can come up. For instance, with our Birch batch, we sent our hardware engineers the very first phones off of the line ahead of schedule so they could perform quality control testing. We discovered a 10kΩ resistor was missing from the PCBA!

This manifested itself into a non-working USB. We are fortunate to have incredibly talented engineers on our team who quickly traced this error down so we could add the resistor to the remaining Birch devices, restore USB, and keep us on track to ship all Birch devices to backers without changing the Birch shipping window.

Thank you for the continued support and spreading the great news about the Librem 5, it is the single best way to make sure we all have a mobile phone that respects society.