Our first order, for a couple hundred boards, has now been at the assembler for about two weeks. Unfortunately, validation of the PCB panelization files they created for us took a few days, and we have now been informed that they will be unable to ship before they close for Chinese New Year on the 19th of January. We tried every trick in the book to get them to ship before they close, but we’ve been unsuccessful. Lead times are crazy at the moment.

The new estimate they gave us is for the 7th of February, which is the first week they’ll be back at work after their holiday. Sorry! We did not expect the Chinese New Year to cause such a long delay. To give us some buffer and to accommodate final shipping logistics (getting the boards to Crowd Supply and then out to backers), we have updated the campaign page to show a March 1st estimated ship date for all orders.

In other news, we are nearly done with the PoE version of esp32MX-E. As mentioned previously, this board will replace the SD card and add support for IEEE 802.3at-compliant Power-over-Ethernet (PoE). This first version will have 12 V and 3.3 V outputs and will be capable of supplying 12.95 W of power. Depending on how this new board is received, we might also add a higher power, 25 W version.

In addition, we will soon have new baseboards available for our esp32MX range: boards with relays, opto-coupled inputs, PWM outputs, and more. These boards will fit in the same enclosure as the current Prototype Baseboard & Enclosure available on Crowd Supply.