News

Hello from Oakland! TL;DR: Back from China. Have good manufacturing options. Should have all remaining quotes in hand this month, so we can pick one and get your keyboards made. Once we sign with a manufacturer, they'll commit to a ship date. Also: Bay Area folks, come see us and a few hundred other projects at Maker Faire on May 20-22.  So very many factory visits When we last wrote, Jesse was in Taipei. He'd just visited the first two of eight potential Model 01 contract manufacturers. The following day, he had a very positive meeting with the last of the Taiwan-based keyboard...

Hello from Taipei! A very jetlagged Jesse here—Kaia's back in Oakland minding the farm. I arrived late Tuesday night and spent this week meeting with the first two of eight or so potential contract manufacturers for the Model 01, as well as two potential wood milling factories.  Over the next two weeks, I'll be visiting the rest, as well as a few additional potential wood enclosure suppliers in Shenzhen. I'll also be visiting the Global Sourcing Fair in Hong Kong. You can think of the GSF as 'sort of like CES, except with very, very few brand names you've ever...

TL;DR: We got dumped. We’ve had the ceremonial pint of Ben & Jerry’s and we’re on our way to finding a new manufacturer. Before you ask, no, there’s no Tinder for keyboard factories. Once we’ve got a new manufacturer on board, we should be able to share a revised timeline for delivery of your keyboard. You can rest assured that we’re not going to compromise on quality and that your keyboard will be as good or better than if we’d continued working with the original manufacturer.   The past month has had its bright spots, too. Parts for the first...

Hello from Oakland! TL;DR: everything’s moving forward. though progress in January was slower than we’d hoped for. Electrical Engineering Since we last wrote, we sent our schematics and circuit board designs to our first-choice manufacturer for review. It took them a bit to get back to us, but they were generally happy with our design. The next step is to get prototype boards made. Because of the upcoming Chinese New Year holiday, the manufacturer hasn’t been able to make that happen this month. They’ve said that they’ll be able to get them put together soon after they’re back from vacation...

Hello from Oakland! We hope your 2016 is off to a great start. Here’s what we’ve been up to lately: Electrical engineering After the last backer update, a couple of incredibly talented electrical engineers stepped up to review the board designs we thought were in pretty good shape. The reviews were very comprehensive…and incredibly humbling. The old boards would probably have worked, but the reviewers identified a whole bunch of things that we should be doing to make your keyboards easier to manufacture, more reliable and longer lasting. The EE contractor in Europe we’d been working with started updating the...