We just reached out, looks like we never received a survey from you.
As a general update for anyone that finds this, we're aiming to get the rest of the board out in the next month or so. If you'd like to get your hands on one sooner than that, please reach out and we'll be happy to expedite things for you!
Hmm, that's very strange. Looks like it was shipped about a month ago. Let's give it another two weeks. If you still don't see it, message us and we'll send another board.
@creator: New factory? Why did you switch to a new factory? I was under the impression that everything was going ok. Just curious. We have a Maker Faire coming up in June and I was thinking of creating an interactive project for the event using this board. But I have a lot on my plate and I won't be able to work on this one if it doesn't arrive soon.
According to Kickstarter you didn't survey people who backed for the 5 pack yet. Did I miss something?
Was pretty bummed not to be able to work whoa into any of the cosplay projects we had at PAX East!
Just reached out, we should be able to get you in on the next shipment. As a more general update, we (finally) got samples back from our new factory, and early tests seem very promising, so it seems like we'll have stock to fulfill everyones orders soon! More details coming.
Sending a message through kickstarter works great. Or email to josh [at] foolishproducts [dot] com.
We haven't taken down addresses for your reward level. If you want it sooner, please indicate the timeline and we'll try to get it out to you, otherwise, please just make a note of this when we get the survey to you.
What is the best way to contact you guys with regards to the status of the project? I am waiting for mine to arrive as well, and I am moving houses soon.
Yash, we shipped your board two weeks ago, you should see it soon. Please contact us directly for questions regarding individual orders. We'd like to keep public channels open for updates that are more generally relevant.
It'd be really great if you sent out a project update; these comments don't get emailed to backers, where project updates typically do. This will keep everyone informed with what is going on.
We will be sorting out a "store" next, to enable people to customize their orders. If you would like to start playing with this board sooner, just send us your address and we'll do our best to prioritize your order.
Our second run of boards has unfortunately been met with some delays, so it'll be 6-8 weeks before we can hope to have everything fulfilled (assuming no further issues arise). That said, we still have lots of boards on hand so please message us if you have a deadline/gathering coming up.
We are here to help you make cool things to share with your communities!
Hi everyone! We sent out most of the early bird rewards last week, and will be posting a more detailed update shortly.
If you are on a deadline, or are otherwise anxious to start playing with a board, please send a message and we'll do our best to accommodate. Please keep in mind that:
1. It'll be 4-6 weeks (assuming no further hiccups) until we get our second run of boards in. Till then, we won't be able to fulfill about half of the kickstarter orders.
2. If you ordered a Gotta Try 'Em All package, there are some other components (most notably the panels), which we won't have stock of until then as well.
To give a glimpse of what we've been thinking about - we are currently writing some documentation/examples to make it easier to get started with the board, and are finally starting to work on a "store" which will enable people to customize their orders with extra accessories!
However, we are doing most of the assembly/distribution at my parents house in Buffalo, NY. For whatever reason the boards in Buffalo are not working quite as well (the raw signal we are measuring is noisier - which makes it harder to make everything else work). We had a long conference a few days ago and I'm optimistic that with a few days of work we should be able to arrive at a firmware that works for all of the boards consistently. I'd be happy to provide a more technical answer if you are curious.
I am headed there on Tuesday, so barring any further surprises we are hoping to ship the first boards soon after that.
Apologies for the delay, we were really hoping to have these out to people for the holidays. At this point everyone has been waiting long enough that we felt like it was better to delay a little longer to ensure that everyone started with something more polished.
Hope we didn't screw up anyones gift plans...
For the time being, happy holidays. May 2017 be a brighter year!
_______
The silver lining is that our initial beta tests have been pretty positive: (https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/510128/mit-hackathon/ <-- we have a cameo!), and we are pretty excited to see how everything develops once things start shipping!
Apologies for the lack of public updates. We ended up sourcing a number of the components for the board ourselves - which, all told, led to about two weeks of shipping delays due to a few mixups :(. Current estimate for shipping out the initial orders is mid-november. Thank you to everyone for your patience. We're doing our best to deliver a high quality device as quickly as possible, and we are happy to address individual concerns if they arise.
That said, lots of progress is being made! We got a photo of the first assembled board back from the factory on friday. Our best guess at the moment is that we'll have the first run on hand within two weeks. We'll be sure to post a more detailed update with photos once that happens.
This run should provide enough boards to fulfill the orders from the "First Edition Whoa", "Just Whoa". Unless we run into QA issues, we also expect to be able to use it to fulfill the "Whoa x Whoa" tier.
There is still a bunch of software work to do between now and then - we will be doubling down on that next. Some initial survey responses make it seem like there is interest in being able to customize orders, and we currently looking into the best way to do that, with the hope of getting something in place before we send the initial packages out.
One development here is that we solved the hardware issue with the NRF24 transmitters, so it seems like it will be reasonably cheap and straightforward to add wireless/bluetooth connectivity! http://imgur.com/CTBwMLO
In parallel with board assembly, we've been doing a lot of soldering ourselves to attach connectors to each piece of EL that we ship, as well as to create converter connectors to make it easy to power existing EL projects!
We'll post pictures of this work in our next update.
We have started turning the technical wheels! We plan on sending our final board design out for assembly in the next few days, and are doing our best to ship out boards to people that reserved an early bird or a just whoa by the end of october.
We had originally planned to order this initial run while the campaign was running (so that we could ship out around now), but things ended up running so close that we weren't able to make that happen. Apologies, should have mentioned this somewhere more explicitly. Turns out it was optimistic to assume that we'd be able to do any other work while managing the campaign.
Our estimate at the moment is that we'll be able to start shipping boards in 5-6 weeks. The biggest hurdle between then and now is that this will be the first run assembled in a factory (and not ourselves by hand). We hope that it goes smoothly, but we will be sure to post an update here if there end up being delays. Our first priority with this project is to make sure that we ship something that works reliably, our second is to ship as quickly as possible.
That said, this kickstarter is all about enabling projects and exploration. If there is an event that you planned on having a board on hand for, but it seems like we won't get one to you in time, please let us know. We will do our best to make it happen. In a pinch, we have a super limited stock of prototype boards avalible. That said, the production boards will be significantly more sensitive (and generally more polished in other ways), and so we strongly recommend waiting for them if time allows.
The other large piece of technical work that we have planned between then and now is a refactor of the firmware. We hope to ship the boards with a library that hides much of the complexity of configuring the capacitive sensing circuitry, while making it straightforward to calibrate/control all of the EL and I/O channels.
The reading you get will be a number between 0 and 1023, which changes smoothly the more wire you touch, but which isn't strongly dependent on where you touch the wire. There are a number of design considerations to consider (for instance, the sensing generates a stronger/more reliable signal when you are tied to the ground of the board), and we'll do our best to produce useful documentation in the next few months.
As for getting bluetooth to work, adafruit has some pretty excellent documentation of one approach: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-flora-bluefruit-le/overview. Only minor tweaking should be necessary in order to get this working on the Whoa Board (once we've made the software more stable on our end).
Secondary question: could the whoa board and El strip signal be transmitted over Bluetooth to a blue tooth receiver and this be fed into an arduino board to act as a remote trigger for performance stuff
I am sure some clever person out there will say - easy!
Hi. I am super excited about the potential of this board. I want to use it with an arduino to control midi. It will be a steep learning curve, but I am sure that some kind soul will provide some guidance. A question: does the position of where the El strip is touched make any difference (that is could it provide variations in midi notes) or is it simply an on/off or momentary state. I am new to all this stuff, but am willing to learn (with a few pointers).
What I love about kickstarter is that people get an idea and put passion and effort into realising a dream. This is frontier spirit for the 21st century.
We don't have much experience with international shipping, and setting a conservative rate enabled us to offer delivery all over the world. We apologize for the expense. Get some friends together and buy a bundle to everyones benefit!
Our current understanding is that if there are customs fees, they will be added later and are something we don't control.
Hi Shane:
1. Yes, this is in the FAQ. Plan on having ~10 feet of wire illuminated at once to an acceptable brightness level. This can be increased by passing in an external supply. If you want to see some demos in a less staged setting: https://www.twitch.tv/make/v/86610270. We did our best to make this usable for real projects.
2. This is definitely something we've considered. If there is a lot of interest in customizing orders, we'll do our best to make custom bundles happen. That said, it will probably be more feasible for the orders set to ship for november or later. We know that some people would like to have a board in hand by the end of October for halloween, and making this deadline will be our first priority initially.
You could simply double the $60 level, or slightly discount things by doing 2 boards, 1 programming cable, 1 piece of EL, and something sensible with the connectors.
Hier kannst du den Projektgründer anfeuern oder dich mit anderen Unterstützern austauschen.
Noch Fragen?
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer vor 3 Tagen
Hi Michael,
We just reached out, looks like we never received a survey from you.
As a general update for anyone that finds this, we're aiming to get the rest of the board out in the next month or so. If you'd like to get your hands on one sooner than that, please reach out and we'll be happy to expedite things for you!
Michael Wade
Superbacker
vor 4 Tagen
I'm still waiting patiently but concerned I may have been forgotten? Has my reward shipped?
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am May 16
Hmm, that's very strange. Looks like it was shipped about a month ago. Let's give it another two weeks. If you still don't see it, message us and we'll send another board.
Benjamin Föckersperger am May 16
still waiting for mine :(
Terry Long am April 28
Got mine a couple of days ago. Thank You Very Much! The wait was long however worth it!!!!
NightPueo am March 18
@creator: New factory? Why did you switch to a new factory? I was under the impression that everything was going ok. Just curious. We have a Maker Faire coming up in June and I was thinking of creating an interactive project for the event using this board. But I have a lot on my plate and I won't be able to work on this one if it doesn't arrive soon.
Derek am March 15
According to Kickstarter you didn't survey people who backed for the 5 pack yet. Did I miss something?
Was pretty bummed not to be able to work whoa into any of the cosplay projects we had at PAX East!
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am March 3
Paul,
Just reached out, we should be able to get you in on the next shipment. As a more general update, we (finally) got samples back from our new factory, and early tests seem very promising, so it seems like we'll have stock to fulfill everyones orders soon! More details coming.
Paul am March 3
I was suppose to get my reward in December any word on when you might be shipping those ones?
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am February 27
Sending a message through kickstarter works great. Or email to josh [at] foolishproducts [dot] com.
We haven't taken down addresses for your reward level. If you want it sooner, please indicate the timeline and we'll try to get it out to you, otherwise, please just make a note of this when we get the survey to you.
anri cohen am February 27
What is the best way to contact you guys with regards to the status of the project? I am waiting for mine to arrive as well, and I am moving houses soon.
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am February 23
Yash, we shipped your board two weeks ago, you should see it soon. Please contact us directly for questions regarding individual orders. We'd like to keep public channels open for updates that are more generally relevant.
Yash am February 23
I didn't get the survey yet, it would be very nice to know where are we right now regarding shipping times. At least a roadmap
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am February 21
@ryan, we'll post a project update soon. Apologies for breaking convention.
@daniel (and others), if you are getting anxious, just send us a message and we'll send your board out! We have ~100 in stock right now.
We're holding off on the mass shipment until we get a few more logistics in place, and it's taking us a bit longer than we'd like to get there.
Daniel am February 21
What's the deal with us " just woah" folks ? Are we going to start seeing our board soon?
Janne Saarela am February 20
I received my Whoa Board today, can't wait to test out what I can do with it!
Ryan Anderson am February 15
It'd be really great if you sent out a project update; these comments don't get emailed to backers, where project updates typically do. This will keep everyone informed with what is going on.
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am February 3
Hi everyone.
Apologies for the lack of communication. Our getting started guide has been published! https://github.com/foolish-products/whoaboard_getstarted
We will be sorting out a "store" next, to enable people to customize their orders. If you would like to start playing with this board sooner, just send us your address and we'll do our best to prioritize your order.
Our second run of boards has unfortunately been met with some delays, so it'll be 6-8 weeks before we can hope to have everything fulfilled (assuming no further issues arise). That said, we still have lots of boards on hand so please message us if you have a deadline/gathering coming up.
We are here to help you make cool things to share with your communities!
Yash am January 24
is there any way to know how long it may take until all the backers receive their boards, I didn't get ant survey yet
SK
Superbacker
am January 23
Just got mine today (Japan). Work fine.
Please update us when the store ready.
Thanks.
Tim Tate am January 19
Just got my board! The instructions say "for more detailed instructions, visit whoaboard.com"
Ummm, no instructions there.
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am January 17
Hi everyone! We sent out most of the early bird rewards last week, and will be posting a more detailed update shortly.
If you are on a deadline, or are otherwise anxious to start playing with a board, please send a message and we'll do our best to accommodate. Please keep in mind that:
1. It'll be 4-6 weeks (assuming no further hiccups) until we get our second run of boards in. Till then, we won't be able to fulfill about half of the kickstarter orders.
2. If you ordered a Gotta Try 'Em All package, there are some other components (most notably the panels), which we won't have stock of until then as well.
To give a glimpse of what we've been thinking about - we are currently writing some documentation/examples to make it easier to get started with the board, and are finally starting to work on a "store" which will enable people to customize their orders with extra accessories!
Thank you for the patience!
Alexandra Wynne am January 17
Can't wait to try this out as I am an EL wire costume designer... any news on the delivery?
Janne Saarela am January 14
Hello, any status updates for this project?
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am December 24
Hey Aimee (and all).
We unfortunately haven't shipped yet :(.
We hardware for the first 150+ boards on hand. The issue currently blocking us from starting to ship is that I was working on the software in Austin, TX. This is currently in a state that I am comfortable releasing (at least to the early bird backers to get some initial feedback - https://github.com/foolish-products/likewhoa-examples/blob/master/button_multichannel_rf7/button_multichannel_rf7.ino#L621).
However, we are doing most of the assembly/distribution at my parents house in Buffalo, NY. For whatever reason the boards in Buffalo are not working quite as well (the raw signal we are measuring is noisier - which makes it harder to make everything else work). We had a long conference a few days ago and I'm optimistic that with a few days of work we should be able to arrive at a firmware that works for all of the boards consistently. I'd be happy to provide a more technical answer if you are curious.
I am headed there on Tuesday, so barring any further surprises we are hoping to ship the first boards soon after that.
Apologies for the delay, we were really hoping to have these out to people for the holidays. At this point everyone has been waiting long enough that we felt like it was better to delay a little longer to ensure that everyone started with something more polished.
Hope we didn't screw up anyones gift plans...
For the time being, happy holidays. May 2017 be a brighter year!
_______
The silver lining is that our initial beta tests have been pretty positive: (https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/510128/mit-hackathon/ <-- we have a cameo!), and we are pretty excited to see how everything develops once things start shipping!
Aimee Yermish am December 24
Any news yet?
Cory Zerwas am December 1, 2016
Any news on shipping "First Edition Whoa" batch?
James am November 29, 2016
@Foolish,
Just curious if the first batch has shipped yet?
Cheers,
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am October 23, 2016
Hey James (and everyone else)!
Apologies for the lack of public updates. We ended up sourcing a number of the components for the board ourselves - which, all told, led to about two weeks of shipping delays due to a few mixups :(. Current estimate for shipping out the initial orders is mid-november. Thank you to everyone for your patience. We're doing our best to deliver a high quality device as quickly as possible, and we are happy to address individual concerns if they arise.
That said, lots of progress is being made! We got a photo of the first assembled board back from the factory on friday. Our best guess at the moment is that we'll have the first run on hand within two weeks. We'll be sure to post a more detailed update with photos once that happens.
This run should provide enough boards to fulfill the orders from the "First Edition Whoa", "Just Whoa". Unless we run into QA issues, we also expect to be able to use it to fulfill the "Whoa x Whoa" tier.
There is still a bunch of software work to do between now and then - we will be doubling down on that next. Some initial survey responses make it seem like there is interest in being able to customize orders, and we currently looking into the best way to do that, with the hope of getting something in place before we send the initial packages out.
One development here is that we solved the hardware issue with the NRF24 transmitters, so it seems like it will be reasonably cheap and straightforward to add wireless/bluetooth connectivity! http://imgur.com/CTBwMLO
In parallel with board assembly, we've been doing a lot of soldering ourselves to attach connectors to each piece of EL that we ship, as well as to create converter connectors to make it easy to power existing EL projects!
We'll post pictures of this work in our next update.
James am October 23, 2016
@Foolish, how did the first run of boards go?
James am September 19, 2016
@Foolish - Thanks for the update, no worries on the delay! These things rarely if ever go exactly as planned ;)
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am September 12, 2016
Hi James (and others following along!),
We have started turning the technical wheels! We plan on sending our final board design out for assembly in the next few days, and are doing our best to ship out boards to people that reserved an early bird or a just whoa by the end of october.
We had originally planned to order this initial run while the campaign was running (so that we could ship out around now), but things ended up running so close that we weren't able to make that happen. Apologies, should have mentioned this somewhere more explicitly. Turns out it was optimistic to assume that we'd be able to do any other work while managing the campaign.
Our estimate at the moment is that we'll be able to start shipping boards in 5-6 weeks. The biggest hurdle between then and now is that this will be the first run assembled in a factory (and not ourselves by hand). We hope that it goes smoothly, but we will be sure to post an update here if there end up being delays. Our first priority with this project is to make sure that we ship something that works reliably, our second is to ship as quickly as possible.
That said, this kickstarter is all about enabling projects and exploration. If there is an event that you planned on having a board on hand for, but it seems like we won't get one to you in time, please let us know. We will do our best to make it happen. In a pinch, we have a super limited stock of prototype boards avalible. That said, the production boards will be significantly more sensitive (and generally more polished in other ways), and so we strongly recommend waiting for them if time allows.
The other large piece of technical work that we have planned between then and now is a refactor of the firmware. We hope to ship the boards with a library that hides much of the complexity of configuring the capacitive sensing circuitry, while making it straightforward to calibrate/control all of the EL and I/O channels.
James am September 12, 2016
@Foolish - How are things going with the production? Have you shipped the early bird rewards?
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am September 7, 2016
Hi Simon,
The reading you get will be a number between 0 and 1023, which changes smoothly the more wire you touch, but which isn't strongly dependent on where you touch the wire. There are a number of design considerations to consider (for instance, the sensing generates a stronger/more reliable signal when you are tied to the ground of the board), and we'll do our best to produce useful documentation in the next few months.
As for getting bluetooth to work, adafruit has some pretty excellent documentation of one approach: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-flora-bluefruit-le/overview. Only minor tweaking should be necessary in order to get this working on the Whoa Board (once we've made the software more stable on our end).
simon kitson am September 6, 2016
Secondary question: could the whoa board and El strip signal be transmitted over Bluetooth to a blue tooth receiver and this be fed into an arduino board to act as a remote trigger for performance stuff
I am sure some clever person out there will say - easy!
Cheers
Simon
simon kitson am September 6, 2016
Hi. I am super excited about the potential of this board. I want to use it with an arduino to control midi. It will be a steep learning curve, but I am sure that some kind soul will provide some guidance. A question: does the position of where the El strip is touched make any difference (that is could it provide variations in midi notes) or is it simply an on/off or momentary state. I am new to all this stuff, but am willing to learn (with a few pointers).
What I love about kickstarter is that people get an idea and put passion and effort into realising a dream. This is frontier spirit for the 21st century.
Good luck with the whole endeavour.
James am September 5, 2016
@Foolish - Congrats on getting funded! Can't wait to get my Whoa Board :)
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am September 4, 2016
Jason,
Thanks!
We don't have much experience with international shipping, and setting a conservative rate enabled us to offer delivery all over the world. We apologize for the expense. Get some friends together and buy a bundle to everyones benefit!
Our current understanding is that if there are customs fees, they will be added later and are something we don't control.
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am September 4, 2016
Thanks Julie!
Hi Shane:
1. Yes, this is in the FAQ. Plan on having ~10 feet of wire illuminated at once to an acceptable brightness level. This can be increased by passing in an external supply. If you want to see some demos in a less staged setting: https://www.twitch.tv/make/v/86610270. We did our best to make this usable for real projects.
2. This is definitely something we've considered. If there is a lot of interest in customizing orders, we'll do our best to make custom bundles happen. That said, it will probably be more feasible for the orders set to ship for november or later. We know that some people would like to have a board in hand by the end of October for halloween, and making this deadline will be our first priority initially.
Jason W. am September 4, 2016
20 shipping to Canada is a bit more than usual, does it include custom? Great project nevertheless!
Shane am September 4, 2016
Is there a limit on how much that can be connected to a board?
Can more EL wire, panels etc. be sorted out or purchased at a later date?
Julie Lappano am August 30, 2016
Great looking product with a ton of potential, Go Josh Go!!
Zaghloul Saad
Superbacker
am August 28, 2016
i think the chip is expensive, the shipping cost very expensive...
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am August 26, 2016
Also introducing A Choreographed Whoa ^ 5. A larger kit for larger projects.
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am August 26, 2016
Introducing Whoa X Whoa.
Voilà :). Thanks for the suggestion Ryan.
Ryan Anderson am August 26, 2016
You could simply double the $60 level, or slightly discount things by doing 2 boards, 1 programming cable, 1 piece of EL, and something sensible with the connectors.
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am August 25, 2016
We'd consider it. What would you like to see included with the boards?
Ryan Anderson am August 25, 2016
Have you considered adding a two-board level?
Foolish Products, LLC. Projektgründer am August 19, 2016
Us too! We're focused on meeting the goal for now. Help us spread the word!
James am August 19, 2016
Hope this gets funded. Go you guys have a plan if you don't make your goal?