Hello all,
There’s not much to report on, but we haven’t updated in a while so thought we’d write something. In short, everything points to kits being in our backers’ hands by the end of February. All kit components have been ordered and will arrive by the next week.
Our goal is to ship kits by the end of the first week of February, earlier for international kits, and therefore there are two to three weeks for the kits to arrive. The course will start near the very end of February. It looks like we are on track to this goal, as we have ordered all major parts. In fact the only part that looks like it will be late will be our custom packing tape. If it doesn’t get here in time we will make do with blank generic looking boxes without sweet custom NarwhalEdu tape.
Boxes, drop testing
What we didn’t realize was the extra cost of using this box is about $5 in USPS shipping, since the kit could comfortably fit in a medium flat rate box which is $5 less than shipping it in this box. That’s okay, these are really great boxes that are deep enough to store the assembled kit and can be used as project boxes. In fact these boxes are so great that we used a full box to play a game of really violent (to the box) soccer without any packaging material and everything came out fine. (Game recommended to us by oneTesla folks).
pen holder test prints
The pen holders were super-expensive to print via shapeways, but our solidoodle didn’t seem to want to handle our specs (or isn’t calibrated properly), so we are contracting them out to a friend who won an Up! printer via an instructables contest.
solidoodle pen holder fail print
International backers: Please note that some of your parts (the microcontroller and breakout board) will be opened inside their packaging, since we are going to manually quality-check that they work before shipping them to you. The lag and shipping cost for replacing parts internationally is such that it is worth it to us to manually check them.
Looks like Cappie and I will be sitting there soldering and heat-shrinking all 200-something potentiometers and counting 5000 bolts/nuts/screws and putting together the kits ourselves. It’ll be a fun week!
We have also been considering the social and cultural aspects of engineering that we want to cover in our course (that are almost never discussed in formal engineering courses). More on this later when we decide what we actually implemement (probably we will ask some of our friends to guest star on our course each week).
We switched lasercutter manufacturers due to a mismatch in our needs and are now source from Yubo Manufacturing in Guangdong Province, China. There were some file errors since we were working in inkscape and they could only use the PDF we provided, but we resolved these (the “3″ and the holes in “C” are moved). The pressfits all worked on the first sample, which is fortunate, because we switched manufacturers so late that there was no way a second sample could have been shipped to us and approved and for there to still be time to get our production run in before Chinese New Years on the 30th (CNY is the major holiday in China). In the picture below you can see how we hedged our bets by including in the sample a piece with variations on all the pressfits and other crucial dimensions in case the different kerfs between our local 120W epilog and Yubo’s lasercutter affected anything.
Yubo Sample
Oh! And Cappie and I designed our posters for our $99 backers.
Narwhals Backer Rewards Poster
We ordered t-shirts from customink yesterday and they will arrive in two weeks. There were a few people who didn’t respond to the survey, but we estimated their sizes and ordered extra on top of that — we figured that we will want some shirts for our parents, and also we can always sell them to our supportive and awesome friends.
Hope everyone had a fantastic winter break and is doing well!
–Nancy and Cappie