Kickstarter

Hello everyone! We've been incredibly busy getting ready to produce the hundreds of Hexys ordered. Here's some of the stuff that's been keeping us busy: 

Reward Surveys and Color Choices

We've collected the information for people who are ordering ship-only rewards (things we just need your shipping info for, like stickers and controller boards). For the rest of the reward surveys, we're waiting until we got a hexapod/figurine in each color, before we let you choose. We feel this will let you get closest to what it is you actually want, being able to see each color of hexapod fully constructed. The servo confusion below has kept us from doing that, but now that that's cleared up, we anticipate getting these no later than next week (purple acrylic is also apparently really rare? We found a source though, so no worries.).

Moving the Laser Cutter 

Moving a 1000lb laser cutter from New Hampshire to Boston, MA. This is the monster that will soon be cutting out several hundred hexapods:

Servos and Sourcing 

We've also been working on ordering all the different components from all the different sources. The biggest deal recently has been purchasing the 15,000 or so servos we'll need to fulfill all the orders. The choice recently has been between two competing servos, the plastic-geared servos we've traditionally used, and some newer metal-gear servos: 

 
We figured because we got so many orders, and thus able to take advantage of such a large quantity purchase discount, we'd look at upgrading everything to metal-gear servos. The idea was that we'd be able to deliver a more durable product for roughly the same production price we had originally targeted. We went about re-designing Hexy to fit the slightly larger metal-gears (switching servos on hexy does require re-design, in case you were thinking about it). When we started running the new metal-gear Hexy, however, we noticed two things:

1.) The new servos took substantially more power. So much more so, in fact, that our AA Ni-Mh batteries couldn't handle it. We were able to finally get it running off two battery packs, one for each side of the hexapod, but then:

2.) The servos tended to stick when hitting the extremes. We didn't have this problem at all with the plastic-gears. We tried a couple different suppliers to make sure we weren't just getting rejects or knock-offs, but they all had the same issues. Some were actual knockoffs, and had the problem worse, but they all had the same sticking problem to one degree or another in the end.

The end result of this experiment is that we've decided to stick with the plastic gear servos for Hexy. They work, we know how to source them, and the designs are already done, so now the first batch of servos is on its way from the factory China. These should take 3 weeks or so to arrive. This is in addition to the multitude of other components that make up Hexy, from the electroincs to the battery holder, adapter plug, ultra sonic sensor, bluetooth module, screws, custom thumb drives, slick packaging, shipping equipment, etc. There's a lot involved in just sourcing all the parts. Wire transfers to Hong Kong, escrow accounts, factory runs of specialty parts (those 5xAA holders are near impossible to find). But its all happening thanks to you guys!

Open Source Release
Now that we've chosen a servo model for good, true to our open-source word we've posted the design in SLDPRT (Solidworks 2012), 3D-printer STL and laser-cutter DXF files for everyone on the github:
http://github.com/arcbotics/hexy 

Those of you with laser cutters and 3D printers should be able to get a sneak-peak at what we're doing, the rest you can have fun with the 3D models! Those of you with Solidworks can even see the built-together assembly (when it isn't broken from part updates). 

Community
We're also working busily on launching the community, starting with the new forum:
http://forum.arcbotics.com 

We're already working with a number of people in the community already to do stuff like iOS/Android apps, GoPro mounts and more, so we're excited to see what the rest of you are looking to do! Start sharing your ideas! This is probably  the most fun part for us, seeing what all of you are planning to do with Hexy.