Some time in the past week, Galago passed that magic threshold where I stopped thinking about it as a platform in development and realized it was a proper development platform. This must be the same feeling an aircraft designer has when what was nothing more than pencil sketches and riveted aluminium suddenly transforms into a method of transportation, a concept so abstract and so removed from the practical concerns of the engineer who made it fly that the result is equally transformative to him.

Galago, too, is taking off. The debugger does what it’s supposed to. When a program crashes, you can type ‘bt’ and ‘info locals’ in gdb and find out why. You can set breakpoints, single-step and read and write variables and I/O registers by their C++ names. The tools download new code on the device correctly every time. You can plug the debugging connection into a running device, pause it, investigate what’s going wrong and fix it, all without thinking about the enormous tower of functionality that makes these things possible. This is the point where a tiny handful of surface-mount components, a circuit board and 27,000 lines of code starts becoming something much more than the sum of its parts.

That’s not to say some aspects aren’t still under development. For example, our web IDE still needs a lot of work. This hasn’t been helped by the fact that the engineer who wrote it left the team a month ago. Despite this and other setbacks, the command-line tools, which form the foundation of the product, are entirely usable and very reliable. What I must emphasize is that development is past the crucial point of inflection where the extensive investments we’ve made in making Galago a rapid-development platform have begun to pay off - it is indeed rapid.

Recently, I’ve started to read comments from the community that are not as supportive as they should be considering the magnitude of work involved. Yes, it’s true I didn’t post as many updates as you would have expected, but I didn’t think it was right to tell you how wonderful everything was when in fact much of the development was horribly trying, stressful, unpleasant for those around us and downright depressing for months at a time. I also didn’t think you wanted to read about how difficult it was or the fact that I personally dreamt of quitting, refunding your investments and just walking away. But I didn’t give up, and neither should you.

I have two items left to develop - I need the bring the web IDE back up to working condition to account for the rewritten command-line tools it’s built on, and I need to nail down the autodetection capability for App Boards, which is the one thing preventing them from shipping (the final firmware needs to be installed on each one.) Please be supportive while I finish these last two crucial tasks.

In the mean time, everything you need to start working on Galago has already been released, provided you can work the command-line tools and are using a Mac or Windows (I just haven’t prioritized completing the Linux version yet so it’s perpetually 80% complete.) Moreover, about 70% of you have received your rewards already, so you can give it a spin now or wait for the revised IDE. Keep an eye on http://logiblock.com/ide for updated instructions.

Lastly I’d like to extend a sincere “thank you” to all of you for continuing to support our project for so long. When I first took pre-orders for Galago in July of 2012 I was genuinely concerned another group might come out with a device with the small size, ease of use and debugging features that make Galago unique. Only now do I realize why they haven’t - it’s really, really hard and it takes a really long time!

Thanks as always,

-Kuy

Over the last four weeks, we’ve been building and shipping rewards, identifying and solving problems in our processes, our software and our team and charting out a direction for the future. A few important things have come up so I’ll touch on those here.

First and foremost

No doubt the most common type of question I’m currently asked is about shipping, address confirmation emails and expected delivery dates. That’s reasonable, as this campaign has been fairly chaotic with lots of different products, several methods of pre-ordering them and lots of unexpected surprises. Despite that, Swish and I have come up with a system that works, and though I’ve described it before it’s something I should communicate formally. Here’s how we’re fulfilling orders:

We broke up shipments into batches based on the packing list, the status of payment versus what was ordered (this ended up being a major task in itself) and other factors, such as destination country and special shipping instructions. The first batch consisted of orders containing only Galagos without pre-soldered pins going to US addresses where the payment was correct and nothing unusual was noted for the order. This expanded, batch by batch, to Starter Kit rewards, Galagos with pre-soldered pins, orders that include USB cables, non-US addresses and orders with incorrect payment (after those were resolved) or special notes.  It will continue to expand to more complex orders until everything is fulfilled.

When I announced our initial shipping plans I said Swish would send you an email to confirm your address prior to sending a package. This turned out to be a really good system, but I didn’t make clear when I announced it that they will send an email to you only when all the constituents of your order are ready and it’s only waiting for address confirmation. Let me apologize if you have been anxiously checking for that email or sifting through spam folders for it. In fact, the message bears repeating so I don’t cause any more undue confusion or frustration:

Only when all constituents of your order are built and ready to ship will you receive an email from us or Swish to confirm your address. You will also hear from us at that time if there’s an adjustment necessary for your order, and we’ll follow up with you directly.

The plan

It’s my top priority to build and ship everything you’ve ordered. This comes before finishing various aspects of the software because those can and will be updated after the physical products are delivered. If something isn’t finished (that’s a lot of things) just be patient and we’ll get to it. This is an evolving product, and priorities and direction are shaped by how users (you) respond to what we’ve built.

In the near-term there are still plenty of unknowns. I’ve only signed off on one App Board as of this writing and there are five left to do. Each one is an entire product in itself, with a microcontroller, firmware, the autodetection and bus-selection protocol on top of their primary Ethernet, Bluetooth, GPS, DAC, accelerometer or LED controller features. As each one is readied and approved for shipment a new reward batch is unlocked and emails will go out to confirm.

Where are things going from here?

As we’ve been struggling to port our software stack (IDE and toolchain) to Windows, I’ve come to realize that it’s probably too convoluted. I’m starting to investigate simpler approaches again, so you’ll probably see a reimagined development tool in the near future. I’m considering both a fully-web approach or a simpler desktop app with the same features. I’ll keep you posted what develops.

Thanks again and please send me your feedback!

-Kuy

Galago has been an epic project for a tiny team. Nowhere has this been clearer than in the complicated roll-out of our product and development tools, which have involved many iterations, dry runs, surprises and ultimately success. Today, many of you received your rewards, and tonight we're introducing the Logiblock IDE - the development software for the Galago platform.

Our new brand, Logiblock.com, is slowly evolving from a pre-order store for our Kickstarter rewards to a central point to learn about, purchase and get started with Galago. It’s also where we’ll put (or link to) tutorials, examples, documentation, videos and projects. For now, however, you can download the development tools at logiblock.com/ide. We’re rolling out platforms (Mac, Windows and Linux) one-at-a-time as we test, debug and approve them. Bear with us, that takes a while to do!

Download

Get started at http://logiblock.com/ide. If it doesn’t work for you please send us feedback in our help section.

Internals

The Mac and Windows versions are launched from an application that opens a tab in your browser. That launcher application is in charge of downloading components of the IDE before starting it, so the first thing you’ll see is a series of progress bars as it downloads the latest versions of each piece. We’ve divided the IDE into three parts, the GNU SDK (about 50MB), the hardware platform (1MB) and the web IDE (2MB). The hardware platform layer contains the debugger driver and low-level source code necessary to compile a minimal firmware image for the device. The web IDE provides what you see in your browser and drives the other two components to compile for and debug firmware on Galago’s ARM chip.

Source

We’ve been quietly pushing the [web IDE’s source] to Github for some time now, and you can see how it works, point out bugs or submit pull-requests there. In time, other parts of the project will make their way to Github too.

Where is ____?

We’re working on it. This project is a huge area for a small team to cover so it’s probable that we have started and simply not released the feature you’re looking for. Be patient and all the aspects I’ve described during development will eventually be completed and released.  If you think of something we could improve, please make or vote on a suggestion in our help section.

Thanks again for your support,

-Kuy

I mentioned in the last update that products are now in the hands of our fulfillment partner, and about one-third of you should have received an email from them already. We’re shipping in stages and trying to work the bugs out of our process before sending all packages out. Please bear with us as we bring this up to speed!

In the meantime I’m proud to introduce the first photos of the final Etherblock, Audioblock and Shield Adapter (previously known as the Ethernet, Audio and Arduino Shield App Boards, respectively.) These boards are from the first production run and after thorough testing, firmware programming and serial-numbering will make their way into your reward packages too. Here they are:

The Etherblock (shown disassembled) was the most popular App Board chosen in this campaign and it’s one of the earliest Galago-compatible boards I designed. This board places break-out connections in a 2x14 row on the right side (click for full image.)

Audioblock is the new name for our board with an NXP stereo DAC and two TI 1.5W amplifiers. This board is the sixth design iteration that optimizes the layout, reduces power supply noise and adds usability features compared to its predecessors. It also has the most complex ground-plane and noise-isolation design of all our boards (click for full image.)

The Shield Adapter permits connecting Arduino shields to Galago and is has a safe, flexible power supply design that should cover the majority of shield power cases, even working with those that would supply 5V power to an Arduino. While we can’t ensure compatibility in all cases, the board is easy to modify for other scenarios (click for full image.)

IDE

Our IDE was held up temporarily by a bug in the ARM memory-access layer which caused some surprising and annoying issues in the IDE itself. I fixed that bug last week and apart from an ‘endurance crash’ (a crash after a random duration of use) in the Windows driver the development tools are respectably alpha. My next update on Monday or Tuesday will formally introduce the IDE and explain how to get started with them.

Special shipping requirements

As a reminder, if would like us to make special shipping considerations for your reward please contact us as soon as possible. We can switch the carrier to UPS or FedEx upon your request (and with a revised shipping charge) or make other adjustments if necessary.

Thanks again and stay tuned for our next update,

-Kuy

Let me first apologize for delaying this update by more than a week. We’re gearing up to start shipping rewards and to release our IDE, and that's consuming all our energy. Just like the challenges of turning a one-off hardware prototype into a product that can be manufactured in volume, preparing software for widespread release is a complicated and time-consuming affair.

Our sole focus now is making your experience as good as possible when you receive your rewards. Our challenge in doing so is that this is a big project, involves hardware, native applications on three platforms and a large testing surface. Additionally, we continue to improve our development tools every day and need a reliable method to keep users up-to-date with our latest improvements. As such, I designed an auto-updating launcher that will download new components (the compiler, SDK, and the IDE itself) at start-up time. This means that if you encounter problems, simply exit the application and restart it because we may have fixed them and pushed an update already.

For those who are curious, I built the auto-updater on top of our code-sharing platform, moduleverse, so it shares all the benefits of that technology.  I'll go into more detail about how the auto-updater works another time.

Now shipping.

We're trying to ship rewards after nailing down some final discrepancies. In previous updates, I mentioned that there are more than one hundred backers for whom there is an order problem that would delay shipping. For example, a Kickstarter pledge amount may not match our calculated amount for selections made, or we may not have received survey and address information. We have chosen a partner for fulfillment and over the next eight days one of us will contact you about the following things:

- We will contact you to confirm your shipping address is current.
- We will notify you if there are outstanding questions for your reward, for example if you have paid for pre-soldered pins but our records do not show that you selected them.
- We will give you a way to pay for any adjustments necessary due to, for example, forgotten international shipping or accidental under-payment.

Please follow the instructions in the forthcoming email and contact us if there are any additional adjustments necessary or problems to be solved. We’ll do our best to reply in a timely fashion.

Always building.

Right now, only a handful of software bugs are between us and release and we plan to have them fixed before you receive your hardware. We’re working hard to attack one aspect of the project at a time and we’ll keep you posted with our progress.

Thanks again for your patience and expect to hear from us soon!

-Kuy