Hi Guys,

We wanted to let you know that we have been quietly shipping USB drives for the past week or so. We've mainly been quiet because we've been preparing for the Maker Faire that starts tomorrow in San Mateo California.  Most of the team is out in CA but Noah is still back in Boston plugging away, burning, and sending out drives. 

We're excited to be wrapping up the final step of this amazing Kickstarter campaign. We'll update again soon but we wanted to say thanks for your patience and support as we begin to launch our products and company to new heights.  We're also pretty excited about our Maker Faire presence this year which is spread across 3 booths to demo Modkit for VEX IQ, Modkit support for the TI Launchpad ecosystem, and the Wiring++ project which brings threads and events (among other important features) to the world of Wiring and Arduino.  Check out our blog post for more info on our presence at Maker Faire (especially if you're in the Bay Area) and check out the pictures below of Noah at work burning and shipping drives!

All the Best,

The Modkit Team (mostly from California)

Hi Everyone!

It looks like it's time for another update.  When we put Modkit Micro on Kickstarter, we did so explicitly to get Modkit Micro out to the world as a stable, commercial product.  While this journey has taken us longer than we had hoped, we thought we'd share some of what we've been up to so that you can understand why we feel we're on the right track now more than ever.

I've been on the road for much of 2013 solidifying deals and partnerships that have and will continue to allow us to invest in Modkit Micro and its related products. It's often a tough decision to put off the next release (and impending flash drive mailings) so that you can hop on a plane to invest in a partnership that will pay off for your users and supporters sometime in the future. One of our most important partnerships is not yet public (will be in about 2 weeks) but there's no secret that we've been working with Texas Instruments to provide support for a number of their Launchpad-based microcontroller platforms. We're really excited to work directly with one of the worlds largest chip-makers to bring you an accessible (price+ease-of-use) experience right out of the box. I caught up with Adrian Fernandez of TI at South by Southwest (SxSW) to push support of the MSP430 Launchpad and had a chance to meet with many exceptional TI-ers who work to enable the growing Launchpad ecosystem.  We'll be out at Maker Faire in May demoing Modkit Micro support for TI Launchpad at the TI booth so if you're in the Bay Area, make sure to check us out.

While we think adding multiple platforms gives our users and educators important new options, every new microcontroller platform or board presents new challenges for integration.  Luckily, there is a defacto standard for high-level microcontroller programming called Wiring created by Hernando Barragán.  This is the platform behind Arduino and many similar programming environments and is the basis for Modkit Micro's board support.  We've connected with Hernando and Wiring to work on some changes that will make it easier for us and others to support multiple boards as well as some features that will change the game in simple yet powerful microcontroller programming once again (Hernando's 2004 thesis already changed it once.)  Our goal is to bring all the Wiring derived platforms and IDEs back into Wiring so that we can work together to create the most compelling user experience possible. Wiring will also have a booth at Maker Faire so expect to see us there as well.

But with all these partnerships and initiatives, how are we going to support our current software?  Exactly!  This has made us think smarter and a little bit longer term.  Besides the complexities introduced by multiple board support, our editor's user interface has been getting a bit hard to manage.  This is because in order to create a desktop-like experience on the web, we had to invent our own user interface framework.  As we've been building that alongside Modkit Micro, it doesn't always have the cleanest interface and we often need to tack on new framework features just to add a simple feature to Modkit Micro. Lately the cracks have started to appear and we've been forced to start building tools to help us test, inspect, and re-factor our custom framework.  Again, we believe spending additional time to get things right (and have the right tools) is in the best interest of our company and our users.

So where does that leave the final Kickstarter rewards?  Collin and I fly back to Boston later this evening and we'll start pushing again towards the next release.  We've learned to try to stay optimistic yet cautious about making promises, but I can say we'll be motivated by all the postage-paid packages just waiting for drives that our new intern Noah has prepared while we've been away.  And we have some really powerful new debugging tools to track down a few important remaining bugs.  Also, Noah's been teaching himself programming by automating address verification emails so if you have not yet responded with your address verification, please do so to ensure the drives can go out to you ASAP.

Thanks again for your continued support and patience as we turn Modkit Micro into a real product and Modkit into a real company!

Ed and the Modkit Team

Hi Everyone! 

We know that many of you have been really excited about Modkit Micro and we often get asked how you can help. So here we are... We need your help!

We're looking for interns for our Cambridge, MA office (and sometimes the Boston Fab Lab). On a daily basis, our projects brings us from web design/development in Javascript/HTML/CSS/Python to desktop and embedded systems programming in Python and C/C++ . But beyond the technical work we also need help with answering emails, finding bugs and running workshops for kids and novices. Does this sound interesting to you or someone you know?

Great! But just as important as these technical and organizational skills, we're looking for individuals who are just as passionate and excited as we are about democratizing programing and engineering. And don't forget, even when we're finding bugs, we're doing it by playing with electronics and robots! We can't imagine a more dynamic environment to work and play in, and would like your help in finding candidates who have one or more of these skills and are willing to learn more. Please pass this along!

Location: Boston Area
Time: 2-3 afternoons or mornings per week
Who: college students, recent grads, or anyone interested!
Compensation: based on experience
Get in touch: jobs [at] modk [dot] it

Thanks!
Modkit Team

Keep the feedback coming!

So it's time for another update!  Last update we told you about opening Modkit Micro to the public via our blog as our holiday gift on Christmas eve.  We released what we hoped would be the final  Modkit Micro fixes before finalizing the Modkit Link updates and sending out the flash drives.  Since then, we've got a ton of feedback and have rolled about a dozen fixes into the live web version of the editor.  We know we need to finalize the Kickstarter campaign and are happy to be able to include this last fury of bug fixes into what looks like will be a solid release.

Next Steps..

While spending so much time in the editor codebase fixing the bugs our users have uncovered, we decided to take the time to tie up some loose ends in what we think is one of Modkit Micro's coolest features:  the ability to move between the growing list of supported boards with ease.  This feature would allow you to start (or find) a project using a Wiring board and move to a Lilypad or Sparkfun Pro, bringing together a whole world of microcontroller development platforms.  But what if the pin you (or the original authors) were using in the project is not available on the board you want to use? (eg Pin48 when moving from the well equipped Wiring1.1 to the more barebones Sparkfun Pro)  We've tightened up these edge cases by detecting when pins are not available and highlighting the pins that need to be tweaked (see screenshot below).

And while we're not quite ready to enable sharing, we have finished migrating online loading and saving of projects to our new datastore and will be releasing that along with a few additional fixes to Alpha Club members (Kickstarter supporters) in the next few days.  Then we'll be focusing on new Modkit Link and desktop releases for final testing. Thanks so much for your patience and feedback as we move this closer to the commercial grade product that you all believed Modkit Micro could be!

We wanted to wish a happy holiday to all of our Kickstarter backers who are celebrating!  We're celebrating a whirlwind year, and as many of you remember, we put Modkit Micro on Kickstarter to help launch it as a serious product, with a paid desktop version to help support a free web version.  We're happy to say that the custom flash drives are back in the USA with updated memory chips (thanks USBMemoryDirect.com) and we're finalizing the release so they can preload the drives before sending them back to us.  Things are tight with the holidays but we expect to be shipping within a week of the new year which will allow us to hit the ground running with a paid version in 2013!

But that's just half the story.  Your support of Modkit Micro on Kickstarter was also targeted to help us provide a free version to the general public.  This is an important part of our social and business models and we're happy to say that we have finally released a public preview via the Modkit Blog. We'll continue to post updates here on the Kickstarter page until all the flash drives are sent out, but expect us to start moving more of the updates to the blog.   

We expect many kids will find a microcontroller kit under a tree in a few hours, so maybe you can help them find Modkit Micro.  We also posted a quick "Getting Started Guide", so make sure to check out (and pass along) the full post.