Hello Everyone,We hope everyone is doing well and staying warm and/or safe from blizzards. Or if you happen to live in place that is currently warm then just know that all of us here in Chicago are extremely jealous.I know a lot of people have been concerned about their boards and whether or not they are actually going to make it to you. A bunch of you have all received "your board it being shipped notifications" from BackerKit which has created a ton of confusion (scroll to the bottom for info on that). So to set the record straight we are going to open up the hood with a guest post from our Electrical Engineer/Manufacturing Engineer Daniel:
Daniel with some boards ready to go through SMT processing
I’m Daniel, the Design / MFG engineer and I just got a break from expediting the factory production and I wanted to take some time to let you know how your boards are doing.First off, I’d like to apologize and take personal responsibility for not communicating more. Things are actually really good (which I’ll go into more), so every obstacle we’ve encountered is has been fairly simple and easy to overcome. It was hard for me to see the day-by-day slide, because every problem that has come up has been fixed and reincorporated into our process. The next run of boards is going to scream through.We’ve already performed two 100-board pilot runs and had successfully implemented manufacturing changes for issues that we found after performing Design For Manufacturing (DFM) reviews.
Click on this image to see a more detailed view of the manufacturing process
Dash Pro: 50% of the Dash Pros are still un-populated. As you’ll see below, this will actually get you your boards faster.50% of the Dash Pros are queued up for selective solder of the connectors. This means they already have all the components except the connectors placed. Then a robot solders on the headers. I’ll try to get a video, because it’s pretty cool to watch.Dash: 90% of the Dashes are also queued up for adding the through-hole components.10% of the Dashes are already in the hands of users!We have switched gears between trying to push out as many Dashes as quickly as possible, to as many Dash Pros. The Pros can be selective soldered, whereas with the current design, the Dashes need hand-soldering on the header pins. We’re working on the same in parallel, but there are a significant larger number of you who ordered Pros. We are operating on getting the most people the most boards soonest, as long as that also means that everyone gets their boards faster after this reconfiguration.
Dash Pros Ready for Selective Solder
Because Konekt is dedicated to open hardware, I’m joyed to be able to share with you lessons learned and the details of what’s slowing us down. I’ve seen all these things before, and I’m sorry that it impacted the delivery. There is a list about 10 times as long of industry best practices we followed that did pull in the schedule :).
So, it’s an unfortunate list of errors, but we have solutions to overcome all of these issues. I’m not excited at all about the delays, but I’m actually really happy with the manufacturing process and all the improvements we’ve made.I really am just as excited as you are to get your boards. I can’t wait to watch you change the world.In the interest of transparency you can follow along as your board move through all the manufacturing stages (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MpAnVlNCvVY0P8Dn24aGpSbVZbNT40zMcvwCgmKsMzQ/edit#gid=0)
Click above to check out our real time production dashboard
Yes, and we’re very sorry for the confusion.We use a third-party logistics company to warehouse and ship all of our products. If you’ve ever ordered SIM cards from the store on our website, that’s who actually did the shipping out to you and the Dash is being shipped in the same way. In an effort to be proactive, we exported some orders from Backerkit and uploaded them to the logistics company so that they would be queued up and ship as soon as the boards got to the warehouse. Then, to keep things organized, we marked all of the exported orders as “shipped” in Backerkit. At the time, we didn’t realize that this would alert anyone that it was shipped and we figured that a bunch of Dashes were incoming any day so it wouldn’t matter that much. It’s obviously taken longer and we apologize if some of you saw that message and thought that your order was lost.Anyway, if it says it’s shipped in BackerKit, that just means that it’s queued up with our shipping company. When your order ships for real you’ll automatically get an email that night with the tracking information.We apologize again for the confusion this caused.
In Shipping Update #1 we promised a free MB of data for every week past Nov 16th that we didn't deliver. Technically speaking we have started shipping, but know it doesn't feel that way. It doesn't even feel that way to us. Next week boards will be going out in volume, so we are going to call it a 10 week delay and give everyone an additional 10MB of free data. Stay tuned for a promo code in the next couple weeks.
It seems like we do a lot of apologizing in these updates, and honestly we mean it deeply everytime. Its only because of your support that we were able to get the Dash off the ground and we feel deeply committed to getting the product to you. We can't thank you enough for your patience as we've dealt with the hurtles facing us.As we get closer to delivery date (and after delivery as well!) remember that you can stay in touch with us via Twitter (https://twitter.com/konektlabs), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/konektlabs/), Github (https://github.com/konektlabs), IRC, and our community forums (https://community.konekt.io/).Team Konekt