As a couple of you have reported, some kits that shipped more recently included DC port bezels with port openings that were too small. This made it difficult for the DC barrel jacks to fit through the holes when installing the solar charger circuit. I would like to apologize if you encountered this issue when assembling your kit.

What happened was that, of all the components, the bezels are one of the components that have undergone the most design tweaks. The height of the bezels are adjusted from batch to batch to compensate for variances in thicknesses of bamboo we get, which affects the overall height of the enclosure "walls." Additionally, I've been making the ports progressively smaller to try and eliminate gaps, to improve overall fit. At some point, I went too far. The port openings are short by less than 0.5mm (1/64"), but that's enough to make assembly a bit more difficult than it needs to be.

Fortunately, the solution isn't too difficult. I've updated the instructions with a work-around, which shouldn't add more than a couple of extra minutes to assembly. Of course, for those of you who didn't expect to run into this problem, it may have taken much longer to find a solution. I apologize for this flaw, and I'd like to thank those of you who pointed out the issue for doing so. The design files have also been modified to fix this issue in future kits.

Happy New(ish) Year! It's been a while since I've posted an update, so I thought I'd take a minute to tell you that, well, there's not much to report. As they say, no news is good news, right?

We continued to make, pack and ship kits up until the new year, and just kept going. I'm quite happy to say that I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Basically all kits for the $70, $80, $90 and $140 levels have been shipped, and there are only about 10 kits left for the $115 level as well. Deluxe Edition kits were sent to all $500 backers, and the Limited Edition kits will ship to $250 and $500 level backers by the end of this week. The $25-level rewards should also (finally!) ship this week.

Once the rewards kits have been shipped, we'll switch modes and put more effort into selling the remaining kits through our store. Costs so far have ended up being much higher than projected, so I'll need to sell the remaining inventory to pay back debt and maybe pay my "volunteers". Hopefully there'll be enough money to fund the next project, but more on that later!

It's been a while since my last update, so I thought I'd post a quick update. The replacement bamboo showed up on Monday, so we're well stocked for now. There may have been a small number of kits sent out where the fit wasn't quite as good as I'd like due to extreme variances in the thickness of bamboo we used, but we now know to look out for that and change the dimensions of parts accordingly. We're still constrained by laser time, but we've added one more member to our team, and he'll be checked out on the laser next week, so hopefully that'll increase our throughput. My mom is also in town from Japan for the holidays, and she's been pressed into service too (that's her in the photo below). 

So, all in all, we're making steady progress. Here are the numbers of kits shipped, broken down by reward level:

• $70 rewards: 3 of 5 shipped
  
• $80 rewards: 12 of 14 shipped
• $90 rewards: 69 of 74 shipped
• $115 rewards: 8 of 58 shipped
• $140 rewards: 61 of 74 shipped

The Limited Edition engravings are also complete, so those will ship out very soon to the $250 and $500 backers. (Actually, I'll do another post just on what I ended up doing with the Limited Edition, because I think it's pretty cool...)

So, that's basically it for now. We have 6 hours of laser time scheduled for tomorrow, and I have another 4 hours reserved for Saturday. I'm going to take Sunday and Monday off, but will be back at it on Tuesday. I think we're on track to get most of the kits shipped by the end of the month/year.

Ok, I should go to bed now... I need to get up in 6 hours to make it to my 9am laser reservation... Yikes! 

Hope y'all have a happy holidays!

While the plan/hope was to ramp up production so that we could get most of the kits out in time for Christmas, unfortunately, things haven't been quite so simple... 

We encountered a setback last Friday when we received a shipment of 96 square feet of bamboo ply-board (enough to last us for a while), only to find that they were unusable. Since this was the first big shipment from this particular vendor, I don't know if we were unlucky and hit a bad batch, but the boards were basically coming apart even before we put them through the laser cutter, and not surprisingly, over half the pieces we cut were obviously not of a shippable quality, and the rest were of dubious quality as well.

So, that pretty much derailed my plans to cut a bunch of parts over the weekend. We still managed to get 24 kits packed up using parts we had in stock, but then production basically came to a screeching halt since we had no bamboo to work with. I was hoping to be able to get sheets from my secondary source on Monday, but as luck would have it, they were out of stock. Fortunately, they were expecting a shipment imminently, and I was able to pick up some material today. I am also working with the original vendor to get new material that will hopefully be of a better quality, so hopefully my bamboo shortage will be resolved soon.

The other constraint is laser time. I'm doing all the laser cutting at TechShop, which is a shared workspace, and I can only reserve a 2 hour block each day. While I can usually also jump on the laser when it's not being used, the machines have been constantly booked this week with people working on various projects for the holidays. I'm working around this by reserving 2 hour blocks at two different locations. Today, I spent an hour in Menlo Park, then drove down to San Jose to get a total of 4 hours. Tomorrow, I also have two hours in San Jose and two hours in Menlo Park. However, the drive can take up to an hour during rush hour, so while I get more laser time this way, I then have less time to do everything else.

So, between shortages in bamboo and laser time, I expect to only be able to ship 30-40 kits this week, out of the ~150 that are still remaining. I will continue to ship kits as quickly as possible all though next week, but many of those may not get to you until after the holidays. I apologize for the delays, and will be sure to keep you updated with any further developments.

Last week, we shipped 43 Beta kits, and I want to thank all of you who volunteered to be Beta Testers, because it was an invaluable experience for us. We learned a lot, and made a lot of tiny improvements along the way that will hopefully make the experience better for everybody else. We've also gotten some great feedback, and some suggestions will be incorporated in the production kits.

It was also great to get some practice with this whole production process too. The picture you see above (or here) illustrates how the kits are put together. Every arrow represents a cutting, packing or assembly process, and I think there are 36 such steps in the photo above, with maybe another half-dozen that aren't shown here. So there are over 40 steps required to complete a kit, and most of those steps are done by hand. Just about all the laser cutting for the production run will be done by me or Alex at TechShop, and we're also packing the boxes ourselves. Being new to this kind of thing, it really struck me how labor intensive this process is, but it's not something we typically witness as consumers.

While this kind of work is typically done by cheap laborers in places like China, when we do it ourselves, it's actually surprisingly fun and rewarding. On Tuesday, Production Assistant Alex, my friend (and helper) Eric and his friend Jian stopped by for a mini packing party (photos below). At the end of the night, we had packed 17 kits along with dozens of other smaller sub-components, and I think we all felt rather good about what we had accomplished. There's something uniquely rewarding about making physical things, and being able to point at the fruits of our labor and say "We did that."

And that's the beauty of kits. When you receive your kit and finish assembling it, you'll be able to point at it and say "I did that" and (hopefully) share in the pride and joy that comes with being not merely a consumer, but a creator.

Oh, I guess the "update" for today is: I've received the final production shipment of circuits, and will be starting to ship out production kits this week. There are, however, over 200 kits still waiting to ship (and with 40 steps each, 8000 steps total) so please bear with us. If you are hoping to receive your kit in time for the holidays, please let me know and we can try to prioritize your kit. Also, if you know you'll be out of town during the holidays and would rather not have the kit ship while you're away, let us know too, and we'll do our best to accommodate your requests.