The design for the T-Shirt was completed last week and as soon as I hear back from everyone for size and address I can put in the order. Hopefully that will mean just another 3-4 weeks before yours arrives at your doorstep! If you'd like extras please let me know and I can group them in with this order.

Work continues diligently on the plans. Additional features have made it into the design that should allow the smartCaster to be even more useful. Specifically, user presets have been programmed allowing you to save your favorite settings for future use even when the caster is powered down thanks to the persistent EPROM storage available on the Arduino.

I'm currently redesigning some hardware elements to allow for external interfacing via an off the shelf FTDI cable like this one: http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9718. This will allow for user presets to be dumped to a computer or uploaded to the smartCaster, facilitating easy transfer of settings and backups. These features will be documented and further expanded upon in the Documentation Kit.

Additionally, I've made modifications to the code that monitors RPM so that should the smartCaster fall below the expected rate it will emergency shutdown to reduce the risk of catastrophic damage. This is mostly to prevent damage from stalls due to overloading the weight threshold and also errant bodies coming in contact with the spinning frame (ouch)!

I've designed additional circuitry to monitor the battery level of the two 6v lantern batteries that powers the smartCaster. Running out of juice while in the middle of doing a casting would almost certainly result in a bad casting and wasted casting material which ultimately means wasted money. By monitoring the battery level and giving an alert when it falls below a certain value the user can know to switch the batteries before starting a long casting.

Finally, I've added a small speaker to the control unit which signals when the casting is complete with an audible alert. This is handy to have if you want to start a casting and walk away to do something else. The battery level indicator and RPM monitor alerter also utilizes the speaker to signal any issues that may come up.

This is a lot of stuff to try to sneak in before the official first release but I wanted to make sure the smartCaster was as feature packed as it should be. If anyone else has any suggestions for useful features they would like to see please shoot me a message.

All the best,

-Aurelio

So just as I got back from MakerFaire and was preparing to shoot a casting video disaster struck; the motor I had decided to use to drive the smartCaster had a catastrophic failure and stopped working. The gears themselves appear to be fine which leads me to suspect that the rotation speed was way to high causing strain on the electromechanical internals of the motor. While this was a big set back it gave me a good opportunity to do some additional motor testing to find one that will work better for the smartCaster.

So after a long wait I finally received my new motors in the mail (things take quite a while to get here from Jameco due to customs). After some additional testing I'm pretty happy with another motor that actually had higher torque but lower RPM and should still work perfectly for casting (maybe better) and will hopefully be quite a bit more reliable at a comparable price.

Meanwhile, I've been working on the documentation. The BOM (Bill Of Materials) is complete and contains all the parts that will be needed as well the prices, part #'s and suppliers that the part can be purchased from. I spent a LOT of time optimizing this list in order to keep it to as few suppliers as possible so that shipping costs would be low. In the future I plan on improving it with 'alternative' suppliers in case you were already planning orders from other suppliers and didn't want to waste shipping money on just 1 or 2 things.

The directions are coming along and the basic outline is complete. I'll be using real pictures to document  the process of creating a smartCaster so this will take me some time to finish as I will essentially need to BUILD a smartCaster to do this. Actually, this will be the very same one that Patrick from advancedterrain.com is getting. I can't wait to see the terrain pieces he makes with it!

Everyone who got a pre-release document as a reward will hopefully be getting a copy before the end of the month (official release will be some time in December). If you asked for a t-shirt or hard-copy document a survey should be going out soon asking for your shipping address. Kits are almost complete (a few more parts are on order) so those should also be going out by the end of the month.

Thanks again everyone for your support. I hope to have a real website up by December where the kits will be available for purchase.

All the best,

-Aurelio

Thank you so much to all of you who have helped to successfully fund the project! Thank you to my friends and family who have offered kind words of support and especially to my Wife who has stood by and supported me despite all the time it took from her and our kids.

I'll be describing the next steps within a few days. The goal of the project was to get as far as I could within the funding period and I think I surpassed expectations by taking the smartCaster from idea to conceptual blueprints and finally to a real working prototype. The net proceeds will be used to recoup the cost of creating the prototype, additional casting supplies for testing and the software needed to fully document the process (e.g. Sketchup Pro w/ Layout) so I can release it to you and then the general public. I'd also like to create a few kits and shop them around to some my favorite stores like Adafruit and SparkFun.

As for additional progress and videos: I was out of town last week at the Open Hardware Summit and MakerFaire in New York and ran into some trouble with my motor (it's dead Jim) but will get a video of the smartCaster making some molds as soon as possible.

Thanks again everyone for making this happen. I truly could not have done it without your support!