If you've been following along, you know that the product essentially consists of the housing, circuit board, and code. We got to the point where we were able to test production versions of each one with a full assembly, because they need to work together as a system. This led to some physical changes to the circuit board as well as mold for the enclosure.
Since that time, we created another round of samples for both the plastics and electronics, and everything fits beautifully now! But meanwhile we discovered that we needed to make a small change to the circuits on the PCB layout.
The fastest path would be to go ahead and kick off the PCB production for all of the rewards without testing it again. However, it's always a good idea to have a fully assembled "looks-like", "works-like" production sample to use as a reference. And I don't want to skip any steps. So I've decided to do one more test batch of PCBs.
It feels a bit like we've been pulling a train uphill for awhile and are about to crest the mountain and pick up speed. But that's no time to totally let off the breaks, since it's even more essential to maintain control.
To achieve this, production will also likely happen in a couple of waves in order to further ensure quality... as tests are passed along the way, we'll let off the breaks and even fire up the engines to power through the end.
What that means is that the deliveries will be spread out a bit- my best estimate being that the first ones likely come sometime in late May or early June and then additional ones following in the June-July timeframe. I'll certainly accelerate things as much as I can, but I also want to do everything possible to make the product as good as possible.
In other news, the extra time on the hardware side has allowed us to add a flip animation! This had been kind of a stretch goal and seeing it on the device itself really reinforces the feeling of "digital sand" as the lights travel from one side to the other.
You can watch a video of the flip animation on Instragram...
Overall, I feel like we're in a good place with the project- As you've seen with the previous updates, there are a lot of moving parts with this project and we've managed to overcome the challenges so far. I'm looking forward to going through these final stages and getting them into your hands!
Leave a comment: