First of all, sorry about my failure to provide an update when the campaign ended. Last week I was in vacation mode with family visiting, and there wasn’t that much to report on really. We had long since passed the funding goal, but we unfortunately didn’t meet the stretch goal… just barely! Such a shame. So here’s the deal: if we reach the stretch goal of $15K in the pre-order period before we start to ship units, we’ll still throw in a free GPIO header for every wESP32! So spread the word, tell your hardware hacker friends, convince your boss, beg your significant other, whatever it takes to get there! :) Another 6 starter kits or just one 10-pack is all it takes really.

On the production side of things, we’ve unfortunately run into a delay at the contract manufacturer. I wish they would have been building these boards by now, but they are still finishing up my LiFePO4wered/Pi+ build. On top of that, they’ve run out of 10uF/25V capacitors, which are used on both the LiFePO4wered/Pi+ and wESP32. I’m not sure what happened — it’s possible that I just messed up my calculation and didn’t supply the required number of parts, or that a reel got lost. Either way, we can’t start building wESP32 boards without this part. I have 8000 more of them on order, but they won’t arrive before the end of next week. With this extra week delay thrown in, it’s becoming impossible to meet the December 15 ship date. At the moment, I’m counting on slipping 2 weeks, so we may still be able to ship before the end of the year. But, due to the holidays, the beginning of 2019 is probably more realistic.

Since we sold more units than the initial 230 for which I had parts in stock, we are now working hard on sourcing components for the next build—1000 units this time! Since Crowd Supply was bought by Mouser, they now can help with this process, which is really useful. A couple of parts are on backorder, but based on the delivery dates we see, we should be able to get all the components before the end of the year. This should put us in a good position to make the next delivery date of February 28. And if anyone had reservations about whether I intended to keep producing these in the future, a second build of 1000 units will hopefully help put that fear to rest. :)