Hello Everyone -We hope everyone is enjoying their Christmas. We have some good news...
As of today we have shipped roughly 10% of our orders. We had hoped to be done by this point, but unfortunately we have had more issues than anticipated (see below).But, importantly, we are shipping and nothing will stop us from getting the boards to you soon.
The Dashes are flying off the shelves!
To my chagrin and continued pestering of our Hardware Engineer Daniel, this stuff is not always an exact science, but we are making serious progress.As of today we expect to have everyone's orders shipped within 2 weeks. So, while that is good news we know that this is not exactly what we promised. For a full break down of what's been taking so long, read below.
Yep, we did. And to start, I would like to thank everyone for being patient during this rollout. Believe me, it's just as frustrating for us. We've been at the factory practically every day since September. We've produced two pilot runs of 100 each to iron out all of the bugs and make sure that your experience is as seamless and wonderful as possible. In fact, two weeks ago, we had a great First Article (Demonstration of manufacturing process); the boards came out perfectly. We have a working product and a process that can churn out dashes quickly.Unfortunately, making physical goods is difficult, and one of the great things about the Dash and Pro make it more prone to manufacturing errors. It's a dual-sided incredibly dense board. We have to use a microscope to make sure our programming fixture is making contact with the test pads. We have tests in place to catch the manufacturing errors and through a comedy of errors we have had more than our fair share of issues in the last week. There are really silly things like the SMT line being set-up at the end of second shift, only to be broken down by first shift.
Daniel hand cutting boards at the factory
But, what we're experiencing is a hiccup that will quickly go away. With every issue we improve our documentation and processes, and this gets us one step closer to manufacturing the Dash at scale.But its not all bad news. Things are moving swimmingly on the software/firmware side and...
As of last week got our over-the-air firmware update infrastructure up and running. We also have built an updater so we can continually push you new, bad-ass features.As part of this, we have effectively built our own operating system which lives on the Cortex M0, separate from the Cortex M4 user chip. This means you can update your user firmware without any worry of bricking the device in the field, and you even separate the M0 and U-Blox from the rest of the design and retain all the cloud and OTA functionality. We think this will come in handy when you're ready to move beyond the Dash and design your own customer PCB.Our roadmap for firmware and software will be the subject of our next update so please stay tuned. This is an area where we can't wait to get your feedback.That's it for now. As always, please feel free to bug us with questions by using the chat box on our site or emailing dashhelp@konekt.io (mailto:dashhelp@konekt.io)Happy holidays to everyone,Ben & Team Konekt