Hello from Seattle, Washington!
We started off our day in Albany, Oregon. Getting up to Seattle took a little longer than we'd hoped, due mostly to catastrophically bad traffic. We had enough time to have a quick coffee and dinner before our meetup at Metrix Create:Space.
Metrix is a smaller space and this was one of our larger meetups to date. The space was absolutely packed. We got to talk to lots of folks, though may not have managed to talk to absolutely everyone. Jesse ended up doing Q&A outside so more folks could actually get to the Model 01 prototypes.
One thing we ended up surprising a few people with tonight is our plan for the Model 01's feet. Right now, we're using cheap, black rubber "bumpers" for the four feet on each half of the Model 01. We've never planned to ship with black rubber bumpers, but haven't yet gotten a design for the keyboard's feet that we're happy with, though we have a bunch of ideas. Roughly, what we're going for is a design that will allow you to 'tent' the two halves of the keyboard even when they're not connected and will also let you tilt each half of the keyboard either toward or away from you. The end result should be a design that lets you angle the two halves of the Model 01 in a way that'll be incredibly comfortable, no matter how you define comfortable.
Toward the end of the evening, Matt Westervelt gave us a tour of Metrix. In addition to the usual complement of 3D printers, they have some awfully fun tools. Matt described their pick and place machine as a little bit dated, but it would be well set up to churn out Model 01 PCBs at a rate of about 1 every 3 minutes. The tool that really, really blew our mind was their LPKF Protolaser S. They can use this laser to make amazingly detailed circuit boards pretty much perfectly. (For the circuit nerds in the audience, Matt says they can easily do 2mil traces and spacing.) Combined with the Pick & Place, you could use their tools to do three 'turns' or revisions of a circuit design in a single day. We're generally happy if we can do a turn in less than a week.
One of the folks who showed up this evening was Fabienne from KnitYak. If you haven't seen her stuff, you should. She's currently running a Kickstarter campaign to underwrite purchase of a knitting machine to manufacture her designs. Initially, Kaia was a little bit nervous about spending $150 on a scarf, but when she saw them in person, she had to have one. We’ve been told a few people who've come to Keyboardio meetups are familiar with this phenomenon.
Fabienne has also done a bunch of work hacking knitting machines, documenting what she's done and releasing code to the public, which we totally approve of. Fun math fact: you can get a scarf made from the Rule 110 cellular automaton, which, we believe, is the tiniest Turing complete system ever discovered. Matthew Cook, who proved it’s Turing complete, is rumored to be a backer.
So, you know those soundbites we have from Harper, Gina, and Kellan in our Kickstarter video? Those 15 second blips are actually outtakes from 30+ minute interviews each of the three of them did for us. We'd intended to put out longer versions of their interviews earlier in the campaign, but are running a wee bit behind. Here's Harper:
Today, we drove 251 miles, bringing us up to 7260 miles since we set out from Boston.
As of 11:59pm, 1493 of you have backed us to the tune of $460,618.
We have just under 6 days left before the end of the campaign.
Tomorrow, we're at MakerLabs in Vancouver.
On Saturday, we're at ADX in Portland.
On Sunday, we drive back to California.
On Monday, we're at EventBrite in San Francisco.
On Wednesday, we're biting our nails as the campaign ends.
On Thursday, we're sleeping.
<3 j+k