KICKSTARTER

Its been THREE months... and we finally shipped off the ClockTHREE orders!  Thanks to Amy for seeing to all of the logistical details!  You rock the Casbah baby!

Wow.  What an experience.  Thank you all for giving us an opportunity to try something big.  We are very pleased with the results and hope that you are too.

This will be our last of our regular "weekly" updates.  But we will continue to post here occasionally to keep you up to date on ClockTHREE.  For more frequent updates you can check out our new blog and our facebook group.

Thanks again,

ClockTHREE Team.

Has it only been a week?!  Ok, we are almost ready to deliver the completed ClockTHREEs!!!

The LEDs were mounted thanks to Grandmama (AKA Editor-in-Chief) and Elizabeth.  We fixed the board#4 anomoly, and finished the code.  I've shrunk it as far as I can and packed in as many features as I can.  Stick a fork in it because its done!  (The hardware supports sound, but I cant fit it in without removing different feature.  Since the buzzers sound kinda tinny, I cut them first.)

I has always planned on adding streaming images.  Today I finally implemented it.  Check out Mario going to town on ClockTHREE.

Tomorrow we will complete final assembly and they will ship next week.

Thanks backers!!

Justin

... what I meant to say was...

I've soldered everything but the LEDs on the remaining clocks.  Sorry if you got your hopes up.

J

Bill Church spent the day on Saturday assembling his ClockTHREE.  The final LED went in at "ELEVEN O'CLOCK IN THE NIGHT."  Unfortunately, Bill noticed a couple of open circuits that he fixed with external wiring.  The next day he tested out the "Beer Thirty" hack (see below).   Thanks Bill and great job!  You can read all about his heroics on the ClockTHREE Facebook group.

Our Editor-In-Chief (Margaret Shaw, AKA Grandmama) flew out this week to help assemble clocks!  She has mastered the art of LED bending with hundreds upon hundreds of practice opportunities.

I've soldered all of the boards for all of the ordered clocks and have experienced a couple of troubling anomalies.  By far the most troubling is a short in board #7.  Once discovered it was easy to scratch away the excess copper to fix the problem.

I still have not heard if any of the other kit builders have gotten started.  Please let us know and send pix when you decide to bust out the solder.

So we've mostly just soldered clocks and shipped packages this week, but I do have a couple of updates.

The kit builders should have received kits by now, with the exception of one package stuck in customs.  If you are up to it, we would love a snapshot posted on the ClockTHREE facebook page and keep 'em coming!  If you don't have a facebook account, please send me the pics and I would be happy to upload them (wyojustin on google).

The kits shipped pre-programmed in silent mode.  I will have to reshuffle the code a bit to get the sound part to fit in.  The code is only a couple hundred bytes shy of consuming the entire available memory on the chip.  I figure that all you kit builders will be able to reprogram it as updates come in.

We are continuing to work on the build instructions.  Don't hesitate to drop us a line if anything is unclear.

The near term plan is to finish the clocks, ship the clocks to those who will be comfortable reprogramming them, update the code, and finally ship remaining clocks.

'Til next week!

Justin