KICKSTARTER

Hi Everyone,

Almost all the EVE's have now been shipped, there's just over a dozen left that we shall ship this week.

Support

More people are talking and coding on our forum, emails on KS don't get anywhere near as many eye balls. It would be good to keep conversations in the one place because we can then all see and share http://openmicros.org/index.php/component/kunena/12-eve-alpha-contributers-forum?Itemid=0

Wiki

We are just deciding what to use and will kick this off soon as a way to better create shareable information.

Selling your EVE

There have been quite a number of people asking if they can buy an EVE. As all were made individually just for KS supporters, there's no where to buy them (you are a member of a elite club owning one). If you want to sell yours, mention it on the forum and someone should be up for a deal.

Best regards

Miles

Hi everyone,

Today we began shipping the £190 level rewards. Those of you, will be receiving the new XinoRF  before others can order them. This year we intend to create a whole dynamic picture around this board and it's smaller deployable sister the RFu as nodes and sitting in the middle will be the EVE idea. We have an exciting development to announce soon that uses EVE at the heart of a global not for profit project. Rapid Electronics are soon stock the XinoRF, which is fantastic news. Other distributors will hold them soon also, all have asked when EVE will be ready for wide spread sales.

It is your pledges that have created this!!!! We are planning something to commemorate all of you as being there right at the very beginning :)

We think from advice fed back from some of you guys, we should launch something like an EVE wiki (any advice on what to use would be a real help). From this we can all discover what was good and what could do with tuning, to this end I would like to confirm we are committed to producing the next evolution of EVE in around April/May time. it will be totally backwards compatible because it will be based on the very same circuit as now. It will be more modular so some radios can be plugged in and out, rather than fixed in place. This will yield greater flexibility and something that can be produced more easily. EVE as it is now has been labour intensive to build because of the different combinations people chose (17 we counted).

Once we have all the rewards shipped we can get onto the fun stuff of making some progress in the software side of things.

Best regards

Miles

Sorry guys,

The last update mentioned the £190 level and above, but two people have reminded me the £80 level has all 4 radios also.

So to clarify in better terms, all rewards with 4 radios have been pre modified and will start shipping this week.

Apologies

Miles

Hi Everyone,

Every reward now below £190 has now been shipped except for a couple where we haven't been supplied addresses and the handful of people who haven't paid at all.

To the important bit. One or two of you may have seen discussion on the EVE forum about I2C addresses and pull ups just before XMAS. So here's what happened......

We found out really late that the SPI on the EnOcean device was master only and we needed slave. This is because there's only one UART on the Pi (used by Xbee socket), we needed to add an I2C to UART bridge chip. This was right before the final design which went to the PCB house. In the rush we could not check it worked and what wasn't on the suggested layout was a couple of pull ups, this means the chip doesn't turn on. Ouch, FOUL number one. Then once we got the boards and the full compliments of parts (we needed the cash from KS because there was about £11K of radios, it took about 6 weeks to get the cash out of KS, not what they promise). So we built one and found one of the other I2C devices had the same address. Ouch FOUL two.

So we had a dilemma, either ship and claim "we said you might need the odd green wire" and some instructions to mod the circuit, offer to ship or to fix (reducing the effort), redesign the board (weeks of waiting) or fix all of them prior to shipping (a right pain in the rear).

We talked each through and universally said, although it would be painful, we should mod every single £190 and upwards reward before sending.

So from Jan 2nd until Tuesday this week, Ian has been hunched over a soldering iron doing all the mods.

Sorry we didn't get to ship before Xmas as we had planned (we will start this week) but I hope you fully support us in our decision to mod before sending.

A final note on time-scales, we've tried our utmost to do everything as fast as we could and are really sorry we only hit the £20 reward on time and that each successive reward has taken around a week longer to sort than planned. With the Christmas close-down that added nearly another 2 weeks the highest rewards are now over a month late.

Sorry guys, hope you can see it wasn't for effort, swearing and tears

Happy new year to everyone

Miles

Hi everyone,

Just noticed the posts and thought it best to offer up some advice. The EVE boards were designed to fit in the case. During revisions we added support for optional powering from an external DC jack (requires moving the red jumper over). Hands up, we thought we were being helpful by soldering on the DC jack but it's apparent we didn't try them in the case, hence the jack and case fight for the same space :(

There's 2 options.

1. Remove the DC jack and power solely from the 5v on the Pi (this is where the red jumper is by default) I suggest trying without the case on to make sure there's enough power with whatever else you have plugged in.

2. Do as Nial has and dremmel the case to fit the DC jack.

WHY the DC jack in the first place? The Pi isn't blessed with huge power and we thought it better to give an option to power externally (just in case) because we didn't know just what sort of hardware people would have plugged in, seems the bright idea has back fired, I hope you can forgive us.

Miles