Production Update: Transparency

If you've been following along, you'll recall that we dialed in the electronics and they moved into production- yay! The plastics were all ready to go as well, with the molds being finalized and test shots complete.

The last thing we needed to do was calibrate the transparency of the plastic so the ring effect worked well with the final electronics... but it's proving to be more difficult than I anticipated. See, for the timer to do its "magic", it needs to look opaque from the outside, yet allow light to pass through from the inside. It may sound impossible but there's actually a pretty wide range of transparency for which it works well.

There's been a lot of sample swapping back and forth with the factory and with the latest round, we got really close... so close that I considered shipping that one.

There have been thousands of decisions leading up to this point and this one has been the most agonizing so far. See, I've got a sample on my desk that works well and looks good. Most folks would be happy with it. And I feel pressure to do everything I can to ship things as soon as possible. But I've seen versions where the opacity is better and it really does make it nicer. So even though most folks wouldn't really know what they're missing if I shipped this version, I really think doing another iteration on this will be worth the wait.

I'm looking forward to producing the plastics so we can move into assembly!