The story of ULX3S started a few years ago, when our lab member Emard began presenting to us regularly on what he was doing with his open source FPGA board. At first, only the ubergeeks understood what he was talking about. After a while, though, more of us came to appreciate how impressive the FPGA platform could be. Despite the complexity, many of us joined his ULX3S adventure.
About a year and half ago, we started getting serious about the possibility of launching a crowdfunding campaign. Torn between this idea’s appeal to our open source mindset and questions about whether we could really pull it off, the road to crowdfunding was a long one, and one that turned some of our team members into workaholics. After some time, we finally launched the campaign, but we did so at a moment when we all faced a new set of doubts regarding the current global pandemic.
For us, it has been a most unusual campaign. On the one hand, we are all isolated in our homes, trying to get through the present and prepare for the future. On the other hand, we challenged ourselves to move forward with the campaign and ensure the production ULX3S in order to satisfy everyone involved, including backers, future customers, producers, the hardware community, and our own team).
One thing is for sure, the open source community proved to us over the past couple of weeks that collaboration can make anything possible.
As we bring the ULX3S crowdfunding campaign to a close, we want to THANK all of our supporters, numerous developers, Crowd Supply staff, the maker community, and Radiona team members. Thanks to all of YOU, we successfully navigated our first crowdfunding campaign, and we did so in rather difficult times. For most of us, the future will be quite different from what we had expected, and we are very much looking forward to doing our part as we leverage open source technology to enhance quality of life and to move toward a more sustainable and renewable use of resources here on our planet Earth.
Here’s to the next project!
The Radiona team
