Hello everyone! It's been a while since our last update. We've been madly shipping lights out and I'm pleased to announce that all the lights are now out the door!

Well, nearly. If you were very late in responding to our survey, or had size selection issues and haven't been in touch, your lights are either shipping today or later this week. There are about 30 of you left.

Thank you all so much for all your patience and support. This has really been a great time.

Battery Funny Business:

We have discovered a small issue with the boards that most of you will probably never experience. Brand new batteries, at least the ones we're shipping, start out at 3.2 volts total. This is a little high for our board and for the first minute, some of the boards behave funny until the battery voltage gets down to 3. This doesn't damage anything and only takes literally a minute or two to go away. If you experience this weirdness, you can be assured that it goes away on it's own very quickly.

What the future holds:

We're already well into production on our second batch, this time with some minor software upgrades and some tweaks to the machined components. The second time around is running a lot smoother now that we've done everything once, and the guys we've hired to help us really are moving fast. Pre-orders from the website ship this week and soon after lights will be on sale.

We're in the early stages of developing a front light, so keep an eye out.

FEEDBACK!

We'd love to hear from you if you got your light and how it's working out! Better yet send us a pic of the light on your bike!

Keep in Touch:
Are you friends with us on Facebook? Do you follow us on twitter? How will you know when we make another awesome light?

FB: www.facebook.com/blinksteady
Twitter: www.twitter.com/blinksteady
Instagram: blinksteady

PS - We've started experimenting with some cold weather conditions. The below pic is a light fresh from a bath of liquid nitrogen (-200deg F). Still works! (After the batteries warmed back up a bit).

The time has come kickstarters! Thank you all so VERY much for your support of our project. This has been an amazing experience and we're so thankful for your early confidence. We are pleased to announce that the first production lights are ready to ship!

Though we are still assembling the final products, as they are finished we'll be shipping in batches of around 100. There are lots of variations in the lights and so our batches are going out in batches of light style. The first batch to ship will be black anodized lights with the small clamp and 2mm allen bolts. They are boxed and ready to go out the door on Tuesday.

Assembly is going quickly (we've hired some amazing helpers) and so batches will be shipping every couple of days.

Launch Party: September 9th. 8pm.

544 Park Ave, Suite 3D (follow the signs). In Brooklyn.

G train to Myrtle - Willoughby
RSVP to blink@blinksteady.com so we have an idea of who is coming.

Ride your bike and bring it in for "Factory Installation Service" There will be libations and demonstrations of the CNC Fabrication Process, and probably Ice Cream made with Liquid Nitrogen.

Getting Started.

Each light comes with an 2mm Allen wrench, or a 2mm Allen wrench AND a 2mm Torx wrench - both in a small envelope in the bottom of the box.

When you go to install your light, remove the clamp from the back of the light using the provided wrench. You'll notice two things in the back of the housing: a small white ribbon and a small blue plastic tab. Pulling gently on the white ribbon removes the entire circuit-board and battery assembly from the back of the housing. This is how you will change the batteries. Remove the blue plastic tab from between the battery and the battery contact. Now your light is on!

When the light powers up for the very first time, it has to initialize and may behave a little strange for a few minutes. This is normal. Now you can install your light on your bike!

After the clamp is installed on your seatpost and locked down with the set-screw, push the housing gently back on the clamp. The rubber seal is necessarily small and should be treated with care. The screws holding the housing to the clamp do not need to be super-tight for a nice seal, so don't overtighten them.

We don't have an official warranty policy in place, but if you ever have any problems with your light, write to us and we'll do our darndest to fix the problem. All your lights have been tested before shipping and should operate perfectly.

WARNING: Your seatpost has suddenly become a lot more valuable! If you routinely lock your bike in an urban area you should take care to secure your seatpost to your bike. There are some options for sale on our website to do so, but there are lots of great products and techniques out there as well. One of our favorites involves replacing your stainless hex screw with a zinc plated steel one, and placing a spherical neodymium magnet in the socket. It takes another magnet to get it out!

A Cool Feature we didn't tell you about!

When the light is running, if you place your hand 1/2 inch from the face of the light it will turn off. This is an intuitive way to shut off your light intentionally when you lock it up if you don't feel like waiting for it to shut off automatically.

Don't Disappear!

We're working on new products so keep in touch on our mailing list here to find out when they are available. You can probably guess at some of them but some may surprise you!

Please enjoy.

I hope you enjoy your new lights. They really came out very nice. And thanks again for everything. We'll keep posting updates when each batch ships out. If you want to share a picture of yourself and your bike and your new blinksteady light when you get them, please send them along!

Sincerely

Ben, Mark and Stuart.

The housings are back from laser etching and I thought you'd all like to see some more final-ish parts. These were tests for the laser etching and the logos are backwards. Whoops. Everything else is perfect. There are more pictures at www.Blinksteady.com

Keeping all the assembly in house and local is really paying off. Of course we're still waiting on vendors for ONE LAST PART, but this won't be a problem in the future. We have complete control over the quality and it's been really great designing jigs and fixtures for production. 

All the Circuit boards are programmed and the clamps are assembled. We had 99.7% yield on our circuit boards from the manufacturer; that's pretty good! I am sure this is because we are working with a good shop in California and not going direct to an overseas PCB manufacturer. Their quality control was great. Just two baddies that refused to program. You can see our programming set up below.

Also, we decided to do the thermoforming ourselves and are getting really nice parts. We spent hours building an amazing vacuum former and we spent days testing it, but when it came to do the run it only took 2hrs to make 1000 parts.

Stuart machined the punch for the windows and it's working great! We finished almost all the windows yesterday and they fit perfectly in the housings.

As soon as we receive our window gaskets (the final piece of the puzzle) we will finish assembly and ship in just a couple of days. We're expected the gaskets next week, which is longer than we were quoted. We'll announce a launch-party date as soon as those gaskets are in!

Hello again! We are cruising along on production here at the bike light factory. I'm sorry to report that we are behind schedule for shipping in July, but we are moving forward quickly and I expect a ship date in the next couple of weeks.

All the parts came back from anodizing and look great. The housings are now at the laser engraver and we are getting them back next week. The circuit boards have arrived and...we'll get to that in a second.

ANOTHER GREAT REVIEW

Kris in Seattle has written up another great product review of his test with one of our Beta Prototypes. www.rhodeskc.tumblr.com Favorite Quote: "I did hit it with a direct blast from the hose once or twice to see whether that would penetrate, and it did not. Pressure washer, not so sure, but let’s just say that my bottom bracket got toasted but the BlinkSteady did not. So +1 point to BlinkSteady there. This is Seattle Approved."

SHIPPING

My expectation for shipping is the week of August 20th. We'll be shipping in two batches, one for all the kickstarter rewards, and the next batch for the pre-orders from the webstore. The world is out of stock of the LED's we want, so we have to wait until after August 20th for the second batch. Once we get those boards in however, we should be able to ship very quickly.

HILARIOUS ERRORS: An explanation.

We have enjoyed working with our PCB manufacturer. They mostly do a great job.

The PCB manufacturer is located in California, and we send them our designs and they send us back boards. They are making two boards for us and we program them and solder them together here in our shop. In Cali, they buy all the components and LED's we want and solder them to the circuit boards. However, they buy the actual plastic boards, with screenprinting on them already, from a company in - you guessed it - China. The result is that although the boards work great, some of our aesthetic decisions do not get noticed, and some of our revisions get overlooked. The result with this last run of boards is this:

Do you see the error? One of our boards says "made in china" and the other says "made in the USA". These types of errors are why try to work only with vendors in the US, and after this run we will be insisting on our PCB vendor not use a Chinese shop for our board printing. So, even though we are fabricating most of these parts ourselves, and working only with US vendors, we still can't escape the ubiquity of Chinese parts.

The first 500 boards off the assembly line will have these markings. Sorry guys, but we have to take them because of the delays in getting LED's. We'd prefer to just get these out the door. They still look and work great. The next run of boards will not include the Made in China bit and also won't have all the components labeled on the front.

More next week. We'll show you the assembly line. Stay tuned and thanks again for all your support!

Ben

HELLO ALL!

There have been many requests for an update so here we go. I've been out of town but got back yesterday. Below is a photo of our final prototypes, with some etching and the final, black circuit boards. They're looking good!

For starters, check out a great review by one of our Beta Testers here. http://rhodeskc.tumblr.com/post/25661937860/remember-blink-steady-the-kickstarter-project

Some news:

The summer has kept us plenty busy, and the bike light factory here is in full tilt. Though I (Ben) have been gone, Stu and Mark and have been cranking away.

- All parts are machined and at the anodizer. We get them back this week for etching and assembly.

- We have had some hangups with our PCB production but we are only slightly behind schedule here. The PCB fab that is producing our boards made an error with the black solder masking and are correcting it, but it has caused a delay.

- Most of the Beta testers have received their lights! I just got an email that the international orders have taken 5 weeks or more to arrive. Yikes. We'll see if there's anything we can do to speed this up.

Check out a great review by one of our Beta Testers here. http://rhodeskc.tumblr.com/post/25661937860/remember-blink-steady-the-kickstarter-project

Keep in mind the Beta Units are not anodized and have a different circuit board. :)

This week we begin all the assembly and preparations for shipping. Because of the PCB delay we are not sure when we can get final parts out, but we should only be a week behind hopefully. As soon as we get a new board delivery date I'll post it in an update.

In the last update I mentioned some good news about run times, and here it is:

Our last round of testing with our final prototype circuit boards shows our real life run times to be following:

Blink Mode: 200 HRS
Steady Mode: 80 HRS
Standby Time: More than a year. (obviously, this figure is projected).

These durations are until there is a noticeable drop in brightness, not until the battery is completely dead. This means that it will actually stay working for much longer than 200Hrs. We are planning some additional functionality to indicate how the battery is doing.

Things are going really well and we can't wait to send these out to you all.

More Soon!

Ben