Kickstarter

Dear Backers,

Well, we've been up to a whole lot of component sourcing madness, and also a whole lot of waiting for our orders to arrive. The oneTesla kits include ~100 various parts which are coming from several dozen various suppliers. Sourcing each component has involved hours of searching, comparison, and haggling. Many components have not been in stock in the quantities we need, which has meant either finding replacements or arranging shipment in several batches. 

 In the past few weeks dozens of packages have streamed in, angering the desk workers in our dorm and making us feel like kids on Christmas morning every day as we rip open the boxes. Here's 2000 meters of fiber cable-- most of the world's currently available stock!

It has been difficult to estimate when everything would arrive because we didn’t know which of dozens of pending orders would have issues. Now that nearly everything has arrived and we've moved it from Heidi’s dorm room into our space at Artisan’s Asylum, we have a much better sense of what’s left to do. We forgot a camera the last time we were there, so this smartphone photo of Bayley with all of the boxes in our space will have to do: 

Here’s the breakdown of the parts that we’re still missing: 

Aluminum toroids and secondary coils are delayed due to suppliers. These were among the first things we ordered, and the fact that we’re still waiting for them is quite beyond our control. I guess the lead time we requested for these custom parts is quite short on an industrial timescale, and relative to other huge parts orders ours is relatively small, so we might have gotten pushed around. 

Circuit boards, acrylic chassis, and manuals are delayed due to late ordering. We ordered an extra round of prototype circuit boards to be absolutely sure there would be no issues when we made the expensive bulk order. We had trouble finding a good price and reliable supplier on the acrylic chassis; initial quotes even from before the Kickstarter campaign ranged between $2.50 and $150 each. After a few weeks of back and forth, the cheap quote mysteriously jumped in price to $42 each, and we weren’t able to determine why since the Chinese supplier barely spoke English. We’ve finally found a reliable American supplier and chassis are on their way in another two weeks or so. A handful of parts have changed slightly since we last took detailed pictures, so we'll do final photography for the manual as soon as the missing parts arrive. 

in other news, here are some fantastic new pictures of a modified oneTesla by our friend GGY (see his other photography on flickr and his other projects at http://loneoceans.com/labs/). 

 And what else have we been killing time with at MITERS? High-speed jello photography! Enjoy.