A lot has happened in the past couple of weeks!

The lovely Diane and I managed to find ourselves a place of our own. This is a huge burden off of our shoulders, since we were given notice to leave our last property and only had a couple of weeks left. The new place is a little unit in Noble Park with solar panels, office space and two sheds out the back that the previous owner used to grow herbs in. Plus, we’re getting NBN (Australia’s upgraded-but-still-not-fibre internet infrastructure) in a couple of months. Exciting!

The University of Melbourne got back to me. I’ve been granted a government scholarship (fees + living allowance) to study a PhD there. My research will be about the interpretation of brain signals from a Stentrode device (new type of BCI) in order to drive prosthetics. This will not cause any delays to the delivery of the Labrador hardware (see below) and should not get in the way of post-launch maintenance. What it will get in the way of is future EspoTek products. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

After much head-to-wall contact, that nasty clock skew bug is squashed! It’s gone, in theory and in practice. I’ve run overnight bench tests, scanned through 25GB dump files and all. Once the PC connects to the board properly, there is not a single dropped packet. The keyword, of course, is “properly”. I performed a live demonstration recently and it turns out that the timing constraints were too tight for the particular USB hardware on their PC. Whoops. These have been relaxed significantly, at the cost of an extra 340ms of delay at program startup.

With the bug gone, this means that manufacturing can begin now! I’ve received the final quote from the manufacturer. All I need to do is send of the deposit, then they will get started on the first samples. Shipping should begin in about 4 weeks from now.

Looks like February of 2017 is a good month! ~Chris