Its been 3 months since our Kickstarter drove us to 544% of our required backing, and our retail sales have been keeping pace, with over 250 additional kits purchased through our retail store.  Thanks to Kickstarter, we've passed our yearly sales goal, and its only May!

Unfortunately, handling this incredible demand has delayed the production of Grassroots Mapping Forum, and we missed launching regular, quarterly publications for the first quarter.  Issue #2 can be expected beginning mid-July.

Just an FYI - all except the 3 "fully assembled" IR kits were shipped yesterday, USPS. 

Documentation for the kits is IN PROGRESS -- if you're interested in collaborating on this, please sign up on PublicLaboratory.org (you should all have gotten an invite, but it's open) and get in touch on the mailing list!

Remember - Public Laboratory is an open source community, not a camera company -- so the more people who collaborate to create thorough and well-presented documentation, the better! Think of it as Wikipedia crossed with Instructables, for people interested in the environment.

So, documentation is coming together at publiclaboratory.org/wiki/dual-camera-kit-guide - it's pretty incomplete but growing fast. We'll tend to focus on "first steps" so you'll be able to get started when your kit arrives. 

Hello all - this is Jeff from Public Laboratory -- I was tasked with getting the dual-camera kits together and I apologize for the slow pace. I hope you've been following along with the progress we've been making here:

http://publiclaboratory.org/notes/near-infrared-camera

The recent exciting announcement that Google is publishing the bulk of the Public Lab community's archive of open source maps generated a huge amount of traffic on the site, which I'm also responsible for, and set the process back a bit - I'd planned to ship the cameras this week. 

I wanted to say that as of two days ago we have everything for all 20 kits -- with help from other Boston-area Public Lab members all 20 cameras have been converted, and we just need to get them boxed up and shipped -- with one small exception. The knurled screws for holding cameras in place were the wrong size (3/8 instead of 1/4" long). So with some advice from Brooks Leffler I'm ordering parts for a new set of those screws (we'll have to hand-assemble them as they're not manufactured at that size). That should be feasible Monday -- and I hope to put them in the mail Monday or Tuesday. 

Thanks for your patience!

(This update is by Jeff Warren, also with Public Laboratory, who's been working on the infrared camera rewards)

For those of you waiting for infrared/visible camera pair kits (and those wanting to make your own), I've been making steady progress (with the help and advice of other PLOTS members: http://publiclaboratory.org/notes/warren/3-16-2012/infrared-camera-hacking-meetup-modifies-7-cameras). You can follow along here as the cameras progress and the kits come together -- everything from the auto-triggering mechanism to the swapping of filters inside the cameras:

http://publiclaboratory.org/notes/near-infrared-camera

(RSS feed here: http://publiclaboratory.org/tag/feed/near-infrared-camera)

I should be ready to ship them out in another week or two.

Thank you all for an incredible Kickstarter campaign!  We're overjoyed to say that not only have we broken our wildest goals, we've also more than tripled the number of grassroots mappers in the world.  That, to us, is the biggest success of all.

Today we placed our final bulk orders, and are preparing assembly and shipping now. Do your part by filling out your survey promptly so we can get all the balloon kits out in one big shipment.

with gratitude,

the Public Laboratory Team