Crowdfunding will begin soon

We realize it’s been quite some time since we first announced the upcoming GetWired campaign. Our efforts to be as thorough as possible have made preparations rather demanding. Over the past few months, we have had to overcome several important challenges.

Campaign Planning

Integrity and versatility are two of our core principles. In the interest of the former, we would like to be as transparent as possible about some of the difficult decisions we’ve had to make regarding the latter.

Our goal is to provide a complete, hardware-based home automation solution that is able to perform various tasks in a smart building. To achieve this, we need many different hardware designs. If we offered them all through this campaign, however, we would end up making it unwieldy and confusing for backers. So, after much consideration, we decided to focus on the four GetWired products that we believe backers will find most useful at this point in time: our MCU board, our Ethernet gateway, our 2SSR power and lighting shield, and the RGBW LED shield. We will make these four boards available in various quantities and configurations.

From a planning perspective, even this limited set of GetWired products complicated the financial aspects of our campaign design. We worked hard on this, though, and we believe our solution strikes a good balance between diversity and simplicity. Now it’s up to you to show us whether or not we got it right!

GetWired Handbook

While planning this campaign, we came to the conclusion that – in order to achieve our goal of making GetWired useful for hobbyists, rather than just for a small group of professionals and hard-core enthusiasts – we would need both solid documentation and easy-to-follow setup instructions. From this realization was born the GetWired Handbook. We do not like wasting time, so we started working on it right away. And we kept working on it until, a few days later, our 30 page handbook was ready. It now includes:

• Our backstory and an introduction to the idea behind GetWired
• Technical details about our hardware
• Planning advice for electrical installation
• Information about using our software
• Advice on installing modules and integrating them with open source home automation controllers

The only problem is that we have not yet translated it to English. Hopefully, with the (mental) support of our backers, we will address this issue soon. When the English handbook is ready, we will announce it in a campaign update.

Campaign Video

Our lofty ambition was to produce a campaign video that was actually worth watching. We probably don’t have to tell you that this is not an easy thing to accomplish. Though we are both interested in photography, we have very little experience with shooting video and even less experience with editing it. But, one way or another, we had to manage. Once the campaign goes live, please let us know what you think of our video. (And, of course, if you like the result, please share it with others!)