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