Slow and steady progress
Happy Wednesday Everyone,
We hope that you have had a good week. We have lots of news to share this week.
The In-Person Build Day
The in person build day last weekend was a ton of fun and it was great to meet more of you. It was also helpful for us to get to watch a bunch of first time builds and learn how we can keep improving the assembly instructions. We got SO many great ideas to incorporate there.
Forums Highlights
The forums are really getting active with more and more folks having their machines put together which is fantastic…so much so that it can be hard to keep up with all the interesting discussions being had.
To help organize things we deputized a bunch of new moderators this week to work on keeping things tidy and approachable. We’re also going to be trying out a new system of highlighting a couple things that I think are interesting in the weekly update.
@fireslayer26 organized all of the different 3D printed parts that have been designed and posted in the forums into one thread to keep track of them which you can find here
@CPL asked for some clarification on how to use the aux connectors on the board and made a nice illustration here
@bar is soliciting feedback on a new calibration system which eliminates the slack from the belts (mostly) hopefully preventing the gears from eating the belts here
Etsy Shop
@fireslayer26 has also created an Etsy shop to sell some of the open source designs that have been posted in the forums. We haven’t ordered them yet ourselves, but they look great online. He’s even made improvements to several of them (and re-shared them). If you are looking for an easy way to get some 3D printed parts it doesn’t get easier than that.
Calibration Updates
The automatic calibration process continues to be a sticking point. The transition from “works for me” to “works for everyone” is proving to be challenging, but we are making what feels like steady (if not as fast as we would like) progress.
This week's firmware update includes improvements to the way the calibration process works allowing it to build off of your previous calibration results. The way the system used to work was that it would start off each calibration run fresh without using the values of the anchor points which were previously computed.
Now the system will use your previous results as a starting point hopefully helping the math to more quickly and precisely find your anchor points locations.
Firmware Updates
This week’s firmware update is a little bit lighter than in past weeks since a lot of the changes that we are working on are big changes which need a bit more testing. Hopefully next week’s update will be a big one.
This week’s firmware update includes the calibration computation update above and also a bug fix for the text console not displaying messages after the calibration process completes.
As always you can find the latest firmware here.
Shipping Updates
We are once again waiting on the next batch of controller PCBs which slowed down the number of kits that we shipped this week. They’re in the mail (we have a tracking number) and as soon as they arrive we will be sending out a big batch of kits.
Insider Edition - Shipping complete! We are waiting on shipping information from a few stragglers, so if you haven't seen your kit yet, reach out.
Batch 1 - Shipping is complete! We are waiting on shipping information from a few stragglers, so if you haven't seen your kit yet, reach out.
Batch 2 - Shipping is still in progress. We are waiting on the next delivery of PCBs, which faced some manufacturing delays. There are about 60 kits left in Batch 2 that have not shipped yet, but we will ship them ASAP when the new PCBs arrive.
Batch 3 - Shipping will likely begin on the 23rd now as we wait for the PCB delivery.
Website Pre-Orders - Shipping will begin the week of the 29th and continue into the first weeks of May.
We really appreciated the patience of everyone still waiting on their kits while we work through the PCB delays. In the meantime, we have been busy pre-packing kits without the PCBs and packing the little bags of gears and miscellaneous parts. This means that once the PCBs do arrive, and once we run QC on them, we will send out a veritable tidal wave of kits!
Featuring Melanie’s impersonation of a zombie
Local Pickup
If you would like to sign up for local pickup, please email Anna at anna@maslowcnc.com. She will email you with directions when your kit is ready for pickup. Insider Edition, Batch 1, Batch 2 and Batch 3 volunteers can come pick up their kits between 4 and 7pm on 4/18. Please email Anna if you are going to stop by!
We are also planning to host a few more local pick up sessions and a second In-Person Build Day for those of you in Batch 3 and pre-orders, though the dates are not yet finalized.
Have a great week everyone!
-Bar, Anna, and Roman
