Kickstarter

Creator Amperic on May 14

Oh I met the Ninja Block guys out in SF a few months ago for Tech Crunch Disrupt. They seem like really good guys. Tell them I say hi!

We had to go back and change a few things with the board and case. They minor things. Check out the pictures:

http://www.amperic.com/updateimages/cardnotinstalled.jpg
http://www.amperic.com/updateimages/cardinstalled.jpg
http://www.amperic.com/updateimages/badslotfit.jpg
http://www.amperic.com/updateimages/goodslotfit.jpg

The SD card can be inserted at an angle and then it would fall into the case, meaning you would have to take the cover off to get the card back out. The SD card slot is supposed to fit in between the pillars in the case nearly flush with the wall of the case to prevent the card from escaping from the slot. It turns out its because the SD card slot is being installed too far into the case and this is because a breakoff point (mouse bite) is located directly below the slot. A machine comes by and breaks the boards out at that point. If the SD card was installed how it was supposed to be, the machine would crush the SD card slot while separating the board. We've ordered new boards to fix the problem and made the slot less tall to deal with the issue. Were supposed to get the new boards and boxes in a few days so we will see how it goes.

Richard

Creator Amperic on May 3

Hey Mikkel,
At the moment Knut works with the email trigger and can work with trigger on subject. The email alert subjects are standardized and contain the sensor name in the subject allowing you to do specific triggers on high/low or any of the other 4 alert types. Just to clarify, in ifttt mode, all spaces are converted to underscores and a hash tag is put in front of the subject allowing to to use the quick email trigger. I haven't tried it yet but I'm pretty sure you can use ifttt to create an email to send to Knut's email account allowing ifttt to trigger Knut.

Richard

Creator Amperic on April 13

Hey Jack,
I'm feeling fairly confident that we are a month away. The reasoning behind this is we are expecting the first 20 of the production units next week and I doubt that much will be wrong considering we have in house produced units that work fine. The only difference is these will be made by the contract manufacturer instead of us. If these pass our quality checks we will place the final order. The contract manufacturer said it will take 2 weeks to turn over the whole order. That gives us an additional week for screw-ups. So a month seems pretty realistic.
Richard

Creator Amperic on April 7

Thanks Chris.
We'll keep it coming.

Creator Amperic on April 5

Haha, I actually do think it's amazing and a few beta testers have said that as well, but I'm not usually one to say so. I guess I shouldn't go into advertising.

Creator Amperic on March 31

Oh, I realize I didn't answer the time question. I'm hoping to be shipping in a month, but I've said that before and I was very wrong. I really can only promise you that I will ship it to you and that what I ship to you won't be junk.

Creator Amperic on March 31

Hi Tasman,
Its a little difficult for me to visualize it as well but I will try my best.

Right now I'm building a test jig that will cut down testing time of Knut's from 30 minutes to about 30 seconds. I have to provide this to the contract manufacturer so they can test devices without me. Should be done in the next day or so. I'm also working out some issues that we've found with beta testers, such as a battery indicator that is erratic, ifttt support not working right, missing details in alert emails, hard to understand menus in the apps and so on. Lots of little stuff.

We've ordered a sample sheet of final PCB's from the PCB board house. The board house said the board will be finished on Thursday and I've asked to come up to make a visual inspection before submitting any further orders. I will then take the PCB sheet to the contract manufacturer with enough parts to have the sheet assembled. If assembly goes well and we don't have any parts that are too close together for their assembly process, I will submit an order for 50 units. While waiting for that order to be manufactured, I will ship out the first runs to our beta testers.

If final beta testing goes well and board assembly goes well, we will submit the whole order. We are trying to be very careful with this because one mess up on the way and we will burn through all our cash and then we will have nothing to show for.

Richard

Creator Amperic on March 30

Hey Yue,
We are going to visit the PCB manufacturer on Thursday next week so plan to see one on next Friday.
Richard

Creator Amperic on March 29

Hi Chris,
The $80 pledge is for one Knut. It comes with a built-in Internal Temperature Sensor.
Thanks, Jay

Creator Amperic on March 17

Hey Jack,
I will keep you posted from what I hear back from the contract manufacturer to give you a better idea on when they will actually arrive. I'm speaking to them next week.

Richard

Creator Amperic on March 14

Hey Mikkel,
The sticker worked out in the sense that they let it pass only under the condition that we use a particular abrasion resistant material. The testing agency was also dissatisfied with our manual and are requiring us to add some wording to it. Unofficially I've been told that they are letting Knut pass because the discrepancies were so minor. However our report is currently under review and they told us to hold off on manufacturing until we get a final thumbs up or thumbs down. The testing agency will give us a final answer at the absolute latest's by next Wednesday and at that point we will either have to fix more problems or we will start production.

Richard

Creator Amperic on February 26

Here is before and after pictures of when they put hexane on the fused plastic labels. Hexane seems pretty aggressive...
http://www.amperic.com/updateimages/goodlabel.jpg
http://www.amperic.com/updateimages/badlabel.jpg

Creator Amperic on February 26

Hey Chris,
We had a few problems but nothing serious. Every problem we've had is related to either labels or documentation. Our most serious problem at the moment is we put a label on the back of Knut that was made of paper and that failed CE testing. So we replaced that with a fused plastic label and to our surprise, that failed too... We sent an acid resistant label and that passed so now we are getting final labels made out of this material. Annoying little stuff really.

Richard

Creator Amperic on January 31

Sure, I will do one today.

Richard

Creator Amperic on January 19

Good good, we got a few beta's back out there and we still have to get out another 12. We are working on FCC and CE testing next week. Luckily, the few that are out there are functioning as they should with no major surprises. I personally have the 12 remaining betas running in my apartment for the last 3 weeks. I have a small apartment. Its hard to find a place for 12 Knuts. My girlfriend was surprised to find one in the freezer. It seems to work fine at -5F. At the moment even the batteries seems ok in the cold.

I'm working hard to get all the apps working properly. A great deal of changes were made to the software on Knut and now those changes are being rolled back into the apps.

As I get closer to the finish line, I am more and more in awe of this system. Once I ship these out the door, they cant be stopped except by the owner. It reminds me of bit torrent or something.

Richard

Creator Amperic on December 23

Thanks so much!
Happy holidays to you too,
Richard

Creator Amperic on December 21

Hi Chris,
We hear you. Nothing would make us happier than to get Knut into your hands. We are jonesing for feedback from backers on what they think of the device. I assure you we're working as fast and as hard as we can. Thank you for your patience!
Jay

Creator Amperic on December 16

The remaining parts needed to construct all of the Knut's ship to us on January 11th, so if nothing serious arises, it could happen. We have a contract manufacturer lined up to do the fabbing once we get it all.

Richard

Creator Amperic on December 16

*hysterically, haha

Creator Amperic on December 16

Hey Petri,
I don't mean to be vague, but I will ship Knut when it finally passes quality control. All of the code contained in Knut is written at this point but small variations in email implementations are really holding us back at the moment. I am only 8 items away from the end of the bug list but then Knut has to go through a few weeks of testing to insure all the changes we made didn't break any other functionally.

A week ago I finished the code for turning a device on and off with a simple email. I laughed historically when it finally worked. It works like this, you construct an email that says:

In the subject: Knut, In the body: Light On (your password)

And that's it. Light turns on

I think you will love it

Best,
Richard

Creator Amperic on November 29

Hey Mikkel,
How I see it, if we ship a half baked product, we will be spending more time on tech support than we would actually making the product function correctly. I've sent out 3 and it clear that Knut isn't ready yet.

1. A bug tracking system would be good. I use notepad at the moment... We have a forum setup already but we are not accepting members yet. This will be available for all Knut users. We are also offering a 1 year warranty and I will personally be doing phone and email support (at least till we can find some else to do it).

2. Ifttt support is a little wonky at the moment. We are using the send email trigger method in ifttt. We think this is the best trigger option in ifttt because its instantaneous and because Knut uses email, this is a natural fit. The "send ifttt any email" trigger works flawlessly and immediately (1-2 seconds). We are using this right now with a little red plastic fan and a belkin wimo. We can switch the fan on and off by touching the temperature sensor. Unfortunately, the "send ifttt an email tagged" trigger don't always work. I've been working with Linden over at ifttt to get it sorted out. Thanks for the offer about helping. I'll let you know.

Thanks,
Richard

Richard

Creator Amperic on November 26

Hey Allen and Chris,
We are working on a bug in some of the external sensors which are unfortunately not over the air upgradable. Currently some of the external sensors work exactly once and never report again.

We could ship devices to people who did not order sensors but we still don't have the wireless modules. Actually, good news, our manufacturer just told us that the modules passed quality control and that we should be getting them soon.

Getting closer,
Richard

Creator Amperic on November 21, 2012

Hi Jaime,
A backer of both Twine and Knut dropped off one for us to play with last week. What we realized is how different the two devices are from each other. We think you will really like Knut and all the applications it can be used in. The past couple of weeks we have been very busy updating all of the software and every day it gets better and better. Thank you for your patience, we want you know that we’re making great progress
Jay