Friendly X1Plus Expander Community,

Clocking in at nearly 1,800 words, my last full update (the one about the wiring harness) was a doozy. That’s just what happens when you get me started on a technical discussion about something that seems trivial. This update will be a lot shorter! First off, I wanted to remind you that we only have a couple days left in the X1Plus Expander campaign, after which prices will go up a bit. With that out of the way, I just want to answer one simple question…

Why Did I Build X1Plus Expander?

Why build and commercialize this product? Here are a few answers…

• One short answer is, roughly, because I want to. It seems really cool to get to build a product and bring it to people who want it. My core belief is that there should be more things that people enjoy in the world. I think in the back of my brain I had this idea that there are Big Companies That Build Things, and People Who Buy Things, and I really just did not like that idea. I did not like the idea that I couldn't make things for people, and I didn't like the idea that people like me ("decent engineer, and incapable of saying no to a bad idea") couldn't in general, so I decided to try it and see what happened.
• I keep saying to myself that I don't have anything to prove about this, but obviously it seems like I do. But the thing that I want to prove is a little nonobvious: I want to show that open source hackers and modders don't have to be at odds with hardware manufacturers. I talked a little bit about this at Supercon this year (hopefully the video will be up one of these days?), but it's been a great surprise to get to work with Bambu Lab on X1Plus -- or, at least, to not have to work against each other. X1Plus Expander aims to show that, by letting us build on top of their platform, we can make Bambu's hardware better in a way that serves both their customers, and ours.
• Another answer is that I was hoping to learn how this whole thing works, and document the path enough that someone else could do it. If I can learn something from the Expander program, then that would probably be value enough for me to have done it. (Which is good, because looking at the numbers, I had definitely better not be in it for the money! My current projections are that I am still going to make a bit of profit on each unit, but if you value even my time only since I started the Crowd Supply project, I'm solidly expecting to come in somewhere around the City of Mountain View's minimum wage. It has been nice to be able to buy a pro Onshape license, though, and a cool label printer...) Anyway, if you're interested in some finer-grained detail as to what's going on in the hopes of replicating this yourself, and you haven't been following the Hackaday project page, now might not be a bad time to start.

Whenever I introduce the subject of what I’ve been up to in my dwindling free time to my friends, I start off by joking "well, because I hate myself, I’ve started a crowdfunding project for some hardware…". This is, in part, the case that I conned myself into a bad idea, without even being able to delude myself that it would be easy! But actually, the reality is that there have been some pretty good reasons to do this so far, and I get the sneaking suspicion that I am going to do it at least once again in the future (maybe once I forget some of the less pleasant parts…). Your support has made this worth doing so far. It has been a lot of fun to have people saying "I want to buy this!", and even to have people say "hey, hurry up, what’s taking so long?" (that’s how I know that you really want it!).

So now that you’re at the end of this e-mail, I’ll gently remind you once more: if you had planned to, did you buy your X1Plus Expander yet? If so, you have about 48 hours left to get in on the initial crowdfunding batch and get the first shipments!

Of course, I’m looking forward to keeping you all updated with manufacturing updates after crowdfunding concludes. Thanks again for your support.

Talk soon,
joshua