News

TL;DR: The PVT run didn’t happen before Chinese New Year; Our factory fired an underperforming supplier; We’ve approved the final versions of some parts. Hello from Oakland, We’ve made a bunch of progress over the past month, but we’re behind where we hoped to be. The major issues right now are the keyboard baseplates, availability of the APA 102C LEDs we’re using, and Chinese New Year. Like we did last month, we’ve structured this update as a “part by part” update, roughly paralleling Jesse’s nightly calls with the factory in China. Wooden enclosures The factory sent “golden sample” wooden enclosures...

Hello from Oakland, First up, please accept our apologies for the tardiness of this month’s backer update. We welcomed our son Ira Aaron Vincent into the family on December 3 and the last few weeks have been happy, but somewhat sleep deprived. If this update is a bit shorter or less coherent than you’ve come to expect, this is the guy you can blame: Ira Aaron Vincent was born December 3, 2016 at 10:10 PM While we haven’t been getting a whole lot done in Oakland, our factory has been hard at work marshaling the resources for our PVT (production...

TL;DR: Updated stand design; making progress on firmware; resolving issues with injection molded parts; PVT looking like December, with mass production to follow. Hello from Oakland! Electrical Engineering When we last wrote, we told you about a buzzing issue we’d been tracking in our Chinese-made PCBs. We got some help from Seeed on a proposed fix that dramatically reduced, but did not eliminate the buzzing. As we tested Seeed’s fix, we discovered that it also caused a heat issue when the boards were run with the LEDs turned up to a higher brightness. After a couple weeks of the factory’s...

What $50 Buys You at Huaqiangbei, the World’s Most Fascinating Electronic Market Unsurprisingly, setting up manufacturing has meant that Jesse’s been spending…rather a lot of time in Shenzhen. Mostly, his days at the factory start at 9:30 AM and wrap up somewhere between 8 and 10 PM. But on Sundays, he’s been at loose ends. This trip, he decided to do something about that. Read about our little side project on Medium 

Hello from Portland, Oregon! TL;DR We finally got a full sample of the enclosure + feet + interconnect bars. There’s a problem with reverse-tilt configurations. The factory is on it. We’re headed back to China in ten days to check the first parts coming out of the injection molds. We’re in Portland through this Monday for XOXO, come say hi! We should have some stickers for you. Shipping addresses A few of you have written to tell us that you’ve moved and to make sure we have current addresses. While we’re always happy to hear from you, don’t worry about shipping...