Summary

The Good News: We signed off on Touchfire going into volume production; hooray! Our factory will start making Touchfires next week.

The Bad News: We had to order 80,000 new magnets, and it will be about 4 weeks before they get here.

More Good News: By the time the magnets arrive, the factory will have made a lot of Touchfires! 

Even More Good News: We were able to come up with a single version of Touchfire that works for all generations of iPads. In fact, we were forced to….

The Full Story

Getting Touchfire into production has been a wild ride, but the last few weeks have been the wildest of all. 

Touchfire Released To Production

As you might recall from our last update, we found that our magnets were not fitting into the completed Touchfire keyboards. We tried all the alternatives we discussed in the last update, but at the end of the day we needed to go with new magnets. The samples of the new magnets arrived today, and they fit great.

So we gave the go-ahead to our magnet supplier to make 80,000 magnets. And then we released Touchfire for production in our Los Angeles factory. Needless to say, this was a big day! 

Our factory will now send our tools out for Teflon coating and anodization to get them ready for mass production. This will take about a week. And then they will dive into making lots of Touchfires. Three shifts a day, seven days a week.

The magnets will arrive in 4-5 weeks. At which point our factory will have made all the Touchfires. They will then insert the magnets, seal up the magnet wells, and ship you your Touchfire. So, we are looking at shipping out your Touchfires by the end of June.

iPad 3, Revisited

We bought two iPad 3’s to test Touchfire on, and as we previously reported, quickly discovered that the polarity of the speaker magnet was reversed between the iPad 3 and the iPad 2. We switched the polarity of some of the magnets in Touchfire to match, resulting in a Touchfire version for iPad 2 and a different version for iPad 3.

A few weeks ago, a friend came by with their new iPad 3 and we put Touchfire on it for a test drive. OMG! The speaker magnet in this iPad 3 was the same polarity as an iPad 2. What was going on here?

We headed out to the Apple stores in the Seattle area with Touchfires in hand, and tested about 40 iPad 3s. We found that the iPad 3 speaker magnet polarity was completely random. This is pretty unusual for an Apple product, and it was feeling like a catastrophe for us. The iPad 3 version of Touchfire was dead unless we could find a way to make one version of Touchfire work for all iPads. So we went to work.

We tried micro-Velcro, suction tape, etc. as alternatives for retracting Touchfire. But nothing worked as well as magnets. And then we hit on the answer. If we changed the size and power of the affected magnets in the chin, we could have a balanced solution that worked with both polarities of speaker magnets. And since we were ordering new magnets anyway, this solution would work out.

So, there will now be just one version of Touchfire for all three generations of iPads.

As always, thank you so much for hanging in there with us. Touchfires will be rolling off the assembly line at last!

Steve & Brad

Hi, everyone. We got back our molds last week, and did some test runs of the keyboard.

Overall, things are looking really good! We did find some issues, most of them cosmetic. But there were a few functional issues as well. So we took our molds back to the mold maker to figure out what was going on. And figure it out they did.

They are now making what should be the *last* round of changes to our molds. We will be able to do our next set of test runs the week of April 23rd.

So, we are now looking at starting to ship out Touchfires the week of April 30th.  

Thanks so much for hanging in there with us as we take the final steps to the finish line!

    -- Steve and Brad

Shipping Update

We will be shipping Touchfires to you the week of April 23! We will also be publishing more frequent updates as we count down to that week.

Touchfire for iPad 3

Touchfire will be coming in two models – one for the iPad 2 and one for the iPad 3. Both of these models will also work with the iPad 1. If you want the iPad 3 version, please tell us by April 9th – just send us a Kickstarter message or email us at info@touchfire.com.

If you want the iPad 2 version, you don’t have to do anything.

The Details

We are finally on the other side of getting Touchfire ready for mass production, and have dealt with some interesting and challenging issues along the way. Here’s a recap of what’s been happening over the last few months.

Touchfire is composed of a soft, flexible keypad area connected to some hard pieces we call the ears and the chin. The chin is the main structural component of Touchfire. It provides rigidity, holds several magnets and anchors Touchfire in place on the iPad.

The keypad area of Touchfire has been unchanged since January, when we made our first production test run. We are very happy with how the keys work, and that portion of the design has been completely frozen. The keypad is the heart of Touchfire, so we were thrilled to see how quickly it came together. This led us to believe that getting the rest of the design into production would also go relatively smoothly. Not quite what happened :-)

The keypad is made out of silicone, and we were originally planning on making the chin and ears out of a hard version of silicone as well. That worked great for the ears, but we could never get the chin stiff enough. So in February we switched to a specially engineered injection-molded plastic that our manufacturer suggested.

 This turned out to be a wonderful material, very tough and durable, and it generally goes back to its original shape when bent.

But changing material means a change to the manufacturing process; we have to build new chin and ear molds and modify the keypad mold to accommodate them. This takes us to mid-February. 

We are back down at the factory, ready to try it all out. We spent a couple of weeks debugging, optimizing the flow of material through our molds and fixing cosmetic issues. Everything looks great, except … our magnets in the chin and ears aren’t as strong as they should be. What’s going on here?

It turns out that the thermal conditions of our new manufacturing process are affecting our magnets, which don’t like too much heat. We are going to have to come up with a different approach for incorporating our magnets into Touchfire.

Brad redesigns the chin and ears to accommodate this, and we send the molds back to the mold maker for rework.

We now have pockets in the chin and ears for the magnets to go into. But we need to seal those pockets. We create some tiny covers that do the trick. Brad makes some hand sketches, Steve takes them to a local die maker, and we have finished prototype dies a day later.

They work great. Now all we need is a manufacturer who can make a lot of them in a short time. Luckily, we were already working with a company called Seal Methods, which is making the stickers that go on the back of our cover clips. We head on over to Seal, only a 15 minute drive from the factory. No problem; Seal can manufacture the tooling for our covers and be in production in less than a week.

Fast forward to mid-March. The molds are back, we are down at the factory again, ready to make our next trial run. And we have just gotten an iPad 3. All indications are that it will work fine with Touchfire, since the screen didn’t change at all and the iPad 3 uses the same Smart Cover as the iPad 2. 

Surprise! Apple made a change that nobody else seems to have picked up on – they reversed the magnetic polarity of the iPad 3’s speaker magnet.  This causes Touchfire to twist on an iPad 3. What are we going to do about this? We sit down and try and figure it out.

It turns out that all we have to do was reverse the polarity of some of our magnets to accommodate the iPad 3. We will need to have people specifically order the iPad 3 version, but no other changes. And the iPad 1 will work with either version. Hooray!

However, we did find another problem with the design; during the molding process silicone is leaking into the magnet pockets. Grrr! So we head off to our mold maker, Kingson Mold and Machine, to discuss.

Kinsgon is a pretty amazing operation. We showed you a computer-controlled machining center cutting a prototype mold back in Update 9. Kingson has rows and rows of these enormous machines growling away.

As always, they are very helpful, working with us to devise a fix. Our molds are once again in their shop.

Which brings us to today. We are very confident that these final changes are the last ones that we’ll have to make. After the molds come back from Kingson we will  test them out and get them textured (texturing adds the final finish to the parts). And then we will finally get into full production. Our schedule shows that we will be shipping out your Touchfires the week of April 23rd.

Thank you so much for bearing with us as we work through getting Touchfire into production! Our next update will be in a week.

Steve & Brad

As you may recall, we tried pretty hard to make Touchfire in the US, but ultimately couldn’t find a US manufacturer who would give us a reasonable bid or a reasonable timeline. We let you know all about this in Update 12. So we proceeded to manufacture Touchfire in Asia, where something like 95% of iPad accessories are made today. As you know, we went pretty far down that road.

But doing Touchfire the Kickstarter way - letting the world know everything that goes on with the project, sometimes has strange and wonderful consequences. Right about the time we were racing to beat Chinese New Year, a fellow named Rod Trujillo sent us an urgent message; he needed to talk with us right away. It turns out Rod is the CEO of a US manufacturer that specializes in challenging silicone projects. He said: “We can make Touchfire, and we can compete with any Chinese manufacturer”.

Rod’s company, International Rubber Products, is in Los Angeles; we flew down to Southern California to check it out. The most critical first step in manufacturing is to get tooling made.  An important aspect of our trip involved  meeting with the tool builders. Our first visit took place during the week between Christmas and New Year. The tooling engineers were on vacation that week.  But Rod convinced them to come back early to meet with us. People were flying in from all over. After several hours of technical discussion, the tooling company agreed to make our tools in half their normal time. The fastest turnaround we’ve ever seen. 

We now had a very difficult decision to make. Stick with the Chinese manufacturer who we had been iterating the tooling design with, or take a huge leap of faith and put our eggs into a US basket. We decided to give the go-ahead to US tooling, but kept going in China. This was a costly decision financially, but we felt that if there was a possibility of making Touchfire in America, it was worth it.

The tool builder came through with the mold for the keyboard in record time. That is what we showed you in Update 14. And that is when we decided to pull back from China and fully commit to building Touchfire in the USA.

The last month and a half have been a mad dash to the finish line. We've had to put together an entire supply chain for all the parts of Touchfire – cover clips, sticker pads, packaging, etc. Since we'd gone so far down the road in China, we had a very good idea of what each component should cost. Piece by piece, we've found that if you work hard and if you find the right partners (or if they find you), it is now possible to make an iPad accessory in the US that is as competitive as doing it in Asia.

So, we invited USA Today to come down to Rod’s factory and check out what we were up to. They just published this cool video:
http://bcove.me/yluag1ad

And this article to go with it, which we think might also show up in the print edition on Tuesday or Wednesday:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-03-05/ipad-touchfire-kickstarter/53376000/1

Cheers,
Steve and Brad