We'll be starting on shipping logistics for the Just Whoa and Whoa X Whoa rewards this weekend. Figured we'd post an update now to remind any stragglers to pass along their shipping information!
Also! We'd like to encourage more people to try the store (so that we can distribute more EL materials in the same number of shipments). To help jumpstart things, we're making coupon codes available. Limited time only. While supplies last.
Code #1 - savesavesave - ever mourned the lack of double negative savings in your shopping experience? WELL GRIEVE NO LONGER!
If you don't like saving, you might also try:
Code #2 - zoombini - It'll give you the financial freedom to grab a copy of the game and relive the wonders of mid-90's edutainment on the little screen.
Following up with a status update as it's been a while!
We sent out surveys to two more reward tiers last week, and posted an update yesterday with more details (for if there is one day which Foolish Products takes seriously, it's april fools day).
The short story is that we've published a store and are getting rolling on the next wave of shipments. We should be getting the stock to fulfill the rest of you within the next few weeks.
That said, If you are starting to get an itch to play sooner, please reach out and we'll do our best to accommodate - there are already ~60 boards in the wild.
To this end, if you've already received a board, we'd love to hear feedback. Send us a message or an email! If you are having trouble getting things working as you'd like, we are certainly here to help!
fool & fam
P.S. We just added a new item (you'll never guess what)!
If you are seeing this in your inbox, you should have received an email about a survey asking for addresses. Please fill it out so that we know where to ship your board.
The survey format was a little confined, and we wanted to follow up here to clarify our plans going forward.
First off! We put together a web store based on feedback we received from our first round of backers. If you would like any extra materials included in your shipment, please order them this week (by 4/7) to be sure that they will have them included. We'd like to start shipping things out to people!
In particular, we'd like to encourage people to take a look at the strips and angel hair wire!
Both are significantly more touch sensitive than the standard (high bright) wire we include as a test sample and are pretty fun to play with!
We chose to supply the high bright wire as samples because it was the brightest and most durable EL wire we could find (and so we felt like it would be a forgiving introduction for people), but its thick coating makes the touch response a bit less consistent.
Running this kickstarter has been an exercise in balance, and the choice of EL material to supply is no exception!
Secondly, here is a link to the library which should make it a bit easier to find.
We tried to make a robust set of examples to serve as starting points. If you are new to this world, one good way to get started is to just load the different demos on the board (a process we tried to document, but please reach out if you have problems). This should give you a feel for what is possible without needing to understand any code.
A good next step is to go in and just start changing numbers to get a feel for how things change (you can always load a fresh program on to the board).
On the other end of things, if you are experienced with embedded systems, take a look here to explore the core signal processing knobs.
Finally, we'd like to apologize that it's taken us so long to get to this point. We're a very small team, and between managing our days jobs, production hiccups (the parts for our second run will have crossed an ocean 5+ times by the time they get to you...), and opportunities to present this project (we got a chance to set up a booth at SXSW a few weeks ago!), there's been some juggling involved.
Anyway, what we're really saying is thank you for your patience and trust, and if you've filled out your survey, your boards will be in the mail real soon.
For the time being, let's plan on using the issue tracker to deal with troubleshooting. Also, if you make something with the board, please share!
For example, let's see some light painting tutorials:
This image was made here, by attaching an accelerometer to the whoa board and making the brightness react to motion as a way of visualizing dance.
Almost all of you should have received your boards by now. There are a few that changed your addresses last minute (and a few non-early birds that we promised boards to). Unfortunately in the scramble to get this library out we haven't gotten to that yet, but we will in the next few days. Apologies for the delay if you've been affected.
We have plans for a webstore for getting more EL materials - probably launching in a few weeks. Until then, we would really appreciate feedback to improve the experience for other kickstarter backers. Please fill out this (super short) survey.
Thanks for all the support (and patience). Excited to hear thoughts and see experiments!
It's been an eventful week a Foolish Products (putting aside american politics), and we wanted to give you all a glimpse. We apologize for the delay in news. The aim is to deliver a something that works reliably from the moment it is opened, and we hope that the final incarnation will be worth the wait!
Before we get into the details - the short story is that we are getting very close to shipping boards to the initial backers. We've already sent surveys out to the early bird backers, and will be following up with the rest of you all soon. We currently expect that the initial batch of packages will ship around November 22nd (though this could potentially slip by around a week).
Also, we'll be bringing some of our production boards to the Hacking Arts Festival at MIT. If you are in area next weekend, please stop by and say hello! If you have trouble finding us, send a message here.
Now, the details!
Have we been working on for the past two months? Well, for one, we've been doing lots of soldering!
All of the lower level rewards will receive a one meter piece of EL wire with a connector attached. They will be either lime green, electric blue, or aqua.
We've also assembled a bundle of converter connectors, to make it easier to attach the whoa board to existing EL projects! Each of the lower reward tiers will receive two of these.
Additionally, after a few unexpected shipping delays, we received our first factory assembled run of boards last week!
We much of last week testing these boards, and we are pretty excited by how everything has come together!
A first edition Whoa! How many differences can you spot from the ones shown in the kickstarter? The background here is some conductive fabric that we'll have for sale to improve the sensitivity of the touch sensing in wearable applications.
However, unfortunately, we also ran into a few issues in production, and we will be doing some rework to improve the brightness and reliability of the onboard EL driver (the component that makes the wire glow). We will also be adding an additional component to improve the performance of the sensing circuitry.
Some of the rework we will be doing on each board to improve performance. These updates will be incorporated into the layout in the next production run.
On the subject of requisite rework, the factory we are using had a bit of trouble reliably attaching the EL driver to the board. This is partly a result of using lead-free solder which doesn't "flow" as well (but does make the manufacturing and disposal more environmentally friendly). The factory said that they'd be able to address this in the next run, but for the initial order, we'll be manually reworking each board.
Left: boards as we received them - the break when you turn them on due to poor connections. Right: connections after hand soldering
The rework shown here is delicate, and it will take us a few weeks to get all of the boards from the first production run up to speed.
We also still have some software and documentation work that we need to do in order for things to work reliably and to make it easy for all of you to play! We're really excited to see what applications we'll be able to discover together, and are hoping to get this community going as soon as possible!
Best,
Fool, Dad & everyone else lending a hand here at Foolish Products!
P.S. If anyone has been feeling down lately, here's a positive piece of news from the world of bats!
