Things are on track to ship betas very soon. As Mr. Murphy dictates, some bugs came out of the last few SCSI commands being implemented, which took a while to fix.

Also a day was lost attempting to bring up the debug card, made to access the CPU's high-speed debug port. It's like God Mode on a microcontroller -- in short: it shows me, in realtime with precise timestamps, exactly what isostick's CPU is doing. Finding bugs and performance bottlenecks is considerably easier with that kind of visibility.
Unfortunately the one I soldered up isn't working, so I'm stuck using the existing tools for now. I will allocate more time to fix it after the betas ship.

A bug tracker and ticketing system was also setup (FogBugz, if you're curious). Submitting and keeping track of bugs will be nice and easy.

Anyway, there's only 3 open cases left to reach beta: two very small tweaks to the bootloader/updater and finalizing isosel integration as mentioned in the last update.

Once again I apologize for the time this is taking, and I thank you all for your patience.

Well, that took much longer than anticipated. The Apple bug has been resolved!
After working on it continuously for weeks, I finally hit a dead end and purchased a USB Protocol Analyzer. It arrived on May 2nd, and within 48 hours of opening it, the Apple bug and a few other minor mistakes were caught and fixed. I should have purchased one of these months ago.

So, development is back on track :)

The remaining work is: implement four more SCSI commands and finish integrating isosel into the rewritten firmware. Once that's done, I will confirm beta backers' addresses and start shipping them!

I will continue to post updates as things progress. Thanks again for all your patience as this gets resolved.

It's been a busy almost-two-weeks since the last update. A lot of progress has been made. The fix has required some relatively major changes to the code: making almost everything asynchronous and interrupt-driven. Initially I hoped to get away with just changing a few small sections of the USB stack, but there were lots of dependencies I hadn't considered.

The bulk of the work is done, sans a small portion of the filesystem drivers that refuses to cooperate. It shouldn't be much longer now! :D

As with most products, the "first draft" code was a bit messy, with clean-up planned for the beta testing period. After confirming the custom enclosures back in November, I found they would take some time to produce. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to clean up the code!

In the first week of clean up, it became evident that a move from C to C++ would drastically simplify maintenance and adding nifty features in the long run. I thought for sure it could be done before the enclosures arrived -- I was wrong.

In addition to the rewrite taking longer than expected, there was the necessary change to the enclosures to prevent the cards from getting stuck. Then there was a very long back-order on the adhesives required. Had those been the only delays, however, betas would have shipped two weeks ago.

Since late November I have been working around the clock on the rewrite. Drive emulation is working under Windows and Linux, but MacOS X is still acting up. Today I tracked that down to a bug in isostick's USB stack, and I hope to have it resolved in the next few days. After that, the only thing left on the checklist is bringing isosel support into the rewrite. I don't expect that to take more than a week.

Until the beta units ship, I will make a point of posting updates as the rewrite progresses. I thank you all for your patience, we're very close now!

Oh, the stickers have also arrived :) There are five designs, but I'm going to leave them as a surprise.

Just a quick update on the status of the enclosures and the beta units.

The enclosures should be here early next week. They were held up in customs for a couple days but the issue was resolved today.
The last piece needed to assemble them is a polycarbonate adhesive, which unfortunately is back-ordered. It should be here soon, though.
Then, at long last, the beta units can be assembled and shipped!