Greetings snickerdoodlers,

Time for that bi-weekly update! Don’t worry, this one will be (a little) shorter…

Here’s where things stand:

snickerdoodle - The DFM was completed on time and we are working on addressing the corrections, however this activity suffered some delays due to an “emergency” with one of our contracting jobs…

As an aside, we have been working with a few snickerdoodle customers on custom snickerdoodle hardware/IP projects to help them bring their products to market. Ironically, helping said customers get their products to market has had a somewhat-direct impact on us getting our* products to market.*

But with no outside funding and our savings accounts all but completely emptied into the project, there is really no other practical way for us to pay for the heavy costs of ramping up a production line (unless someone wants to buy a few thousand more snickerdoodles ;-). We wouldn’t necessarily recommend anyone try to simultaneously run two full-time businesses with half the number of people that would normally be required to run one, but hey, “desperate times”…

Anyway, we are expecting/hoping we’ll have fresh outputs by the end of the weekend so we can move onto fabrication. We’re still wrestling with nailing down delivery of one final component, but we’ll work that out one way or another - even if it requires us setting up a tent in the parking lot of a certain semiconductor manufacturer.

Additional notes on snickerdoodle - A few people have asked about the delivery order of the three separate builds and how to know which ‘lot’ they’re in. While we haven’t nailed this down completely, we’re likely to build snickerdoodle blacks first, followed by ‘connectors down’ snickerdoodles, then by ‘connectors up’ snickerdoodles. Each release is only a week apart, so in many cases the delay will hardly be noticeable.

The “app” - We just tested the basic functionality (namely network connectivity) early this week and, aside from some expected nuances/minor bugs, it’s working great! We’ll be rolling this out to our Alpha users after doing a little more internal testing - this coming week…

breakyBreaky - Good to go!

piSmasher - We’re expecting to receive the last parts for the Alpha build early this coming week and we should have boards roughly one week later. More to come on that - we’ll be posting pictures and updates to Twitter (@krtkl_inc) as they roll in…

giggleBits - Not much of an update here, other than that we’re working on a new concept for facilitating software-defined networking…as well as some other commonly requested features like USB 3, SATA, and some kind of snickerdoodle camera interface in a much more straightforward way. We’ll be hashing out the details of this in the coming weeks, but the bottom line is: giggleBits customers (and everyone else) will be pleased with the solution.

cookieJar - We started work again on this and got some fresh injection mold quotes back; however, in the middle of making modifications to the design, the computer that was hosting our 3D modeling software (SolidWorks) suffered a hard drive failure. It’s up and running again, but somehow our SolidWorks installation files have been corrupted. We’re working on resolving this before proceeding…

copperHead - The first articles have been received and we are going to run a ‘torture test’ on them this weekend using the perviously sourced heat sinks as a baseline. Really we’re just testing the thermal properties of the conductive adhesive; they otherwise look great.

SD cards - Good to go!

Jumpers - Received the last of the materials for building the jumpers and they have been shipped out to the CM for assembly. Should have the final jumpers back in a few weeks or so.

Housings/Headers - Good to go!

T-shirts - We’ll figure something out.

That should be everything. Thanks to all those who sent in feedback - both positive and “constructive” - after the last update. Knowing that people care is what keeps us going. Well, that, stubbornness, and a refusal to quit.

Getting there…

Sincerely,

the krtkl crew