Shipping Soon
Dear backers and subscribers,
Our big day is almost here! As of last week, all modules have arrived at our office. We are now testing them and getting them ready to be shipped to you. We need just a few more days, so they will probably leave our office next week. After that, Crowd Supply will handle the fulfillment of all your orders.
For now, we have set the GetWired ship date to mid-July. We believe this to be a conservative estimate and will keep you informed as things progress. If you need to update your shipping address for any reason, please do so through your account settings on Crowd Supply.
Quality Confirmed by X-Ray!
We received the package last Wednesday and spent almost the entire weekend (a longer one than usual, in fact, because Thursday was a holiday here) testing GetWired modules. As we mentioned in our previous update, we decided to change our manufacturing partner to Microbotic. We can now say that this was a very good decision. Despite the physical distance, we were able to collaborate quite closely, which allowed us to address a few minor issues that cropped up during the manufacturing process. In the end, the quality of Microbotic’s work is far superior to that of our previous manufacturer.
To ensure that quality, our manufacturer has tested some of the boards with X-rays. The picture below shows an RCLAMP3304P.TCT, which is an ESD protection element in a really tiny SLP1616P6 case that has given us a lot of trouble in the past. Whereas we used to have issues with short circuits between the pads, everything is now perfect.
Simplified Testing Procedure
We’ve already conducted some functional tests to ensure that everything works as it should. And indeed, everything does. We have yet to find any issues. As a result, we intend to change some of the testing procedures we had initially planned.
Considering the issues we had encountered in previous manufacturing runs, we were ready to check every MCU and every Gateway, which would have required pairing every single module with a microcontroller and connecting them to a PC. Clearly, that would now be a waste of time. (And a particularly annoying waste of time, given that the modules are individually packaged this time, whereas they’ve previously arrived in panels.)
The now-redundant testing described above is the only reason we were planning to pre-flash bootloaders onto MCUs and pre-program Gateways before sending them out to backers. So, while we are no longer doing that, you shouldn’t worry; this decision will not change your experience at all. (In other words, you were going to have to re-flash and re-program your boards anyway.) We just wanted to give you a heads-up, since our campaign page specifically mentioned the pre-flashing of MCUs and the pre-programming of Gateways
Programmers & Adapters
There is one more thing we would like to mention in this update. We’ve noticed that only nine of our backers added a "Programmer, Adapter, and Wires" to their order. While the programmer and the wires are pretty generic, the adapter is a custom design, and anyone looking to install GetWired will need to buy one, make one, or devise an alternative in order to flash the firmware onto their MCUs.
We’re a little worried that we might not have been sufficiently clear about this on our campaign page, so we wanted to bring it up here and propose some possible solutions for those affected:
- You can buy a Programmer, Adapter, and Wires, which are still available and which will ship out almost immediately after the crowdfunding boards. (We are sending pre-order stock to Crowd Supply in the same shipment as the crowdfunding orders.)
- If you would rather make your own (or if you want to save $19), we will soon be publishing the BOM and the Gerbers for that adapter. We'll post an update when the design files are online.
If you have any doubts or questions, please feel free to contact us. Meanwhile, keep calm, and know that your modules will reach you soon. And finally, we leave you with some additional photographs of piping hot GetWired modules, fresh out of the oven.
