We almost forgot — wanted to let you all know that if you want to come try out Swambuddies in person, we’re demoing at Artisan’s Asylum in Somerville, MA today from 7pm to 11pm, as part of their Science Fair! It’s free and open to the public.

We will have a little programming exercise for the kids to teach them the concept of automatically making a robot move in a shape (a triangle or rectangle). The students at Parts ‘n Crafts really enjoyed had fun with it!

in partnership with Parts ‘n Crafts

We’ll also have the more complicated point-and-click demo set up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vPQ7PZFcR8

So come over and try it out

Footage from our test run at Parts ‘n Crafts as well as this science fair demo incoming, please share with friends.

Thanks!

–Nancy, Cappie, and the NarwhalEdu team

I’ve uploaded a video of our latest demo, point-and-click control of robots, which I think showcases our pretty cool computer-vision control of the robots better.

Please keep spreading the word! I know we seem to have lost momentum, but I have great faith in there being lots of people in the world who want to learn about robots With your help, we can reach them! It would be a great favor to us if you could tell your friends about this and we can figure out how to gain momentum again, since we all want to see this succeed.

Soon we’ll have an example of light painting with the robots telling a story, so keep an eye out for that.

I’m also changing the video soon — I’ve also gotten feedback from a few people that, if you only watch the video, it doesn’t mention the course much, which would be a more interesting package than just the robots. I think we’ll fix the course for now as an introduction to robotics course. Also, we aren’t doing a good job of explaining the potential of these robots and how cool they are technologically, since someone said they just seem to be little smartphone robots. So we are working on fixing these — if you have further thoughts let me know!

Thanks,

–Nancy, Cappie, and the NarwhalEdu team

Thanks to everyone who’s been helping us spread the word and who have backed us! 40 backers and nearly four thousand dollars in two days — sounds like people are excited about learning some sweet robot dance moves!

On Monday around 10pm we became a staff pick, which was exciting.

Also, one of our awesome backers mentioned a platypus cap, which sounded like a challenge to us. I present to you a screenshot of our work-in-progress:

It needs to be revised for printability and ease of removing the support material, but it is a platypus cap. Any other challenges?

Behind the scenes, we’ve been active on facebook, twitter (#swarmbuddies), and google plus and in reaching out to media outlets (we’ve been in the press! We updated the front page to link to these articles if you want to take a gander). We’ve also been restructuring the page to emphasize students more than robots, and we also had to take out the “painted caps” stretch goal because that counted as a contest when we checked with kickstarter.

Hope you’ll continue spreading the word to people you know, especially those who might enjoy the class, as well!

If you have the time to answer a single question, “what convinced you to back us?” — please message us on this form – it will help us better understand how to convey to people what we’re trying to do

Thanks,

–Nancy, Cappie, and the NarwhalEdu team

Hello everyone!

Wow, it has been a while since our last update (several months!) In the meantime, we wrapped up the core part of the class, had a contest with prizes, learned that taxes absolutely can kill your company, and are hard at work on our next project, which will launch in a month. Continue reading for some statistics about the class, pictures of the awesome robots people built in the contest, gory details about why not to do your own corporate taxes, adorable pictures of the other robot we have been working on, and some teasers about the project we’re launching in a month.

The Class

Alright, so what happened with the class? Here’s what it looked like:

So, we had 69 people actually register for the class (plus me and Cappie).

40 people completed the first problem as far as we can tell (we didn’t assign actual homework, but used the “problem” interface to hide the answers)

and we had about a 33% completion rate for the core of the class. That is, they got all the way to the potentiometer-controlled LED.

We then got to the contest part of the class, the part we were pretty excited about — we wanted people to take apart their robot and make their own robots. Theoretically there are a lot of benefits to this: (a) you get your own project to show off (b) it helps us understand how much of the material you’ve understood (c) it helps you understand the material better and ask questions as you build your own robot. However, only two people ended up participating in the contest! So, that was a no-go, sadly. In fact, we released the extra kinematics part of the class and 25 people even participated in that. We’re not sure if we just need to tweak things, have a larger student base, or what.

Here are the two submissions, both of which we are very happy about (Owen won for completing a project in time) both in terms of the robot and the design notebook.

Although we’re still stumped as to why a two dozen people haven’t even registered for the class yet, ⅓ of people completing the class is quite high for an online class. It’s lower than we like, but we are happy about our feedback so far.

We asked for feedback mid-way through the class, of which there were only 4 responses. (this is cut-off, but at the top people just rated it as “very interesting, very educational).

We are still trying to work on completing the extra parts of the class — the inverse kinematics and everything — and will get that up as soon as we can, but it’s been tough going lately, as we’ll explain shortly.

The Gory Tax Part

Well, down to the less fun parts of this kickstarter. Roughly, the lessons we learned can be summarized as (disclaimer: do not take any part of this post as legal or tax advice yada yada), if you are serious about your startup, right when you start out, you should (a) get a lawyer to help you incorporate (b) get an accountant to help you with your tax forms (c) get payroll services to deal with paying yourselves. Note: these lessons may only be relevant to C Corps, which we are incorporated as. I don’t know about LLCs or S Corps, I’ve never started a company before

Basically, we thought that payroll and taxes would be three forms a year and simple to do since our situation seemed pretty straightforward and common. How bad could it be? We decided to try doing it ourselves to learn a bit about taxes and what everyone complains about.

BIG. MISTAKE. Here is a rough schedule of how many forms need to be filled out or deposits paid:

Here is the estimated number hours for just one form:

We will reveal our finances some day shortly to really drive home how badly doing your own taxes can go, but we asked around and had some people judge us for our honest mistake of trying to do our own taxes and not understanding the difference between book-based and accrual-based accounting, so we’re not revealing our finances now. But basically, we were in a rather unique situation where messing up this difference hit us _really_ hard (since the kickstarter money all came in at the end of the fiscal year in December and we didn’t have time to spend it actually fulfilling things, in book-based accounting it looked like we had a ton of profit/taxable income. In accrual-based, you get to discount your expected liabilities going forward).

What else is there to say? I feel like paying ourselves at least minimum wage would make us a lot happier. Maybe bootstrapping is not the way to go. It’s hard to say. We hope the next kickstarter will be successful enough that we have a recurring source of revenue, like oneTesla does, and can also at lesat pay ourselves minimum wage for long enough to ship that kickstarter and launch our next product as well.

The Teaser for our Next Product

Since we have no income as there haven’t been continuing sales after the kickstarter, we’ve been forced to go full-speed into our next product, which will hopefully have recurring sales. Keep an eye out for a product launch in the next month. We started out with these motors:

(just kidding, not the small ones but the large one by itself), although now we’ve moved back to continuous rotation servos. Here’s a teaser video:

Our interns for the summer came in. We have two interns from MIT and three high school interns coming in at various points this summer. They’ve been super-helpful. Another update sometime soon…

Wish us luck! Thanks again for all your support and understanding.

–Nancy and Cappie

Whoa, it’s been nearly a month since our last update. Not much to report, we’ve mostly been putting our heads down and working. Putting together a course and running it takes a lot of work. But even when we’re troubleshooting Arduino FTDI driver issues, we find it rewarding to know that definitely this is the first time people have been exposed to microcontrollers and Arduino.

We learned to clearly explain and mark out critical instructions, as several students plugged their potentiometers in backwards, which on our pots will produce smoke. Fortunately the kits worked fine once the pots were plugged in correctly. We’ve even had students point out mistakes in our course, which is great.

magic smoke

(image from one of students)

Not many people have been showing up to office hours, but we’ve been able to give really hands-on help to those who have.

Also, we spent a bit of time and, although it’s a bit later than promised, we have now released most of our files into the public domain. We’re holding onto some of the firmware so as not to spoil our students, and the solidworks files are a bit disorganized as we no longer have access to solidworks, but most of the files can be found on github now:https://github.com/narwhalEDU/CopyCat

Thanks and hope our kit backers are enjoying the course and everyone has received their rewards by now!

–Nancy and Cappie

We’re excited so many people have gotten their kits (intact and everything whoa), shirts, and stickers! Thanks again for all your support. If you ordered a kit/course and haven’t received a confirmation email, please let us know — we mixed backer emails with student emails and tried to correct them manually, but may have missed a few entries. We appreciate emails letting us know you got the kit, they reassure us even if we don’t reply to them

Additionally, please check your tracking numbers (emailed to you) and voicemail in case USPS has tried to contact you – I think some countries have customs taxes (sad), and we’ve had some backers who forgot to update their address when they moved. At this point, most UK and Canada kits have arrived, while kits headed to Asia and the rest of Europe seem to be taking longer. We messed up on the first four kits we shipped out, so we have no tracking for any Australia-bound kits (A being first in the alphabet), sadly. We’re curious how long it takes so do let us know when they get there!

The packing list and information about the course is/will appear at https://narwhaledu.com/copycat (and email invites allowing access to the course will be sent to students directly). Email support at narwhaledu.com for any concerns about the kit contents.

We had a question about the potentiometers, which is another good thing to check — all kits should have two potentiometers, and the wires on the potentiometers should be twisted such that the white lead is in the center up top (and the white lead is on the outside near the bottom).

potentiometer lead picture

potentiometer lead picture 2

We have manually inspected all kits for the I/O shield and USB cable, and on the international kits we also inspected the microcontroller. We’ll shortly send out instructions on how to check that the iteaduino microcontroller works for domestic backers. We didn’t encounter any broken iteaduinos during our inspection of the international kits, so we’re hoping they have a higher yield rate than the shields and USB cables. Although it made more sense strictly financially to not spend the time quality-checking and instead depend on mailing out replacements should any issues arise, our decision rested on mostly how frustrating it would be if a newcomer were to try to debug their kit and didn’t have all the replacements we have on hand to figure out what component went wrong. This way, there can only be one possible failure point: the iteaduinos.

That’s it logistically. We’re hard at work making the course and the course videos and preparing for the course launch on the 28th of February.

See you soon!

–Cappie and Nancy

We finished kitting all the kits last Wednesday, and anticipate the international kits will ship out on Tuesday. Two days behind schedule, alas.

Final parts count of kits

We spent 17 straight hours soldering and heat-shrinking potentiometers, stripping and tinning wires, buying markers at the last minute, and assembling boxes. When we emerged from our cave of robots (space kindly lent to us by oneTesla), several inches of snow had fallen.

so much snow

Monday we will be printing out shipping labels (after we talk to our friend today who has the label printing machine), buying envelopes and stamps for the stickers, cutting the custom kits for our highest-value backers (and printing the narwhals), and opening and testing the international kits.

…narwhalsnail…don’t ask

(I don’t know what’s going on either). Thanks to bchan for modelling the narwhal for us andCharles for the test prints!

The t-shirts also arrived from customink, although we wish we’d discovered the services that print and fulfill your orders earlier, then we wouldn’t have to ship the shirts out ourselves. Oh, and we need to email our general mailing list reminding them this week is the last week to join the course.

The main hold-up, as anticipated, has actually been the packing tape from apstape! We ordered it on the 16th on January, but I guess either we’re a small order, and they don’t care about us, or they’re just backlogged in general. Sigh. The Chinese companies we’ve worked with seem so much more on top of customer service for smaller orders like ours. We’re going to ship out the international kit with plain packing tape to make sure they arrive on time, giving them 2.5 weeks to arrive. Hopefully that’s enough time. The packing tape should get here Tuesday or Wednesday, so all the kits should ship out by Friday. In fact, all the rewards should ship by Friday.

Lasercutter sample fail

The lasercutter order from China arrived last Friday, and we’re a bit disappointed. See the difference in etch quality between the top one and the sample they gave us on the bottom. Perhaps they were rushing for Chinese New Years. I suppose at least each kit will be unique!

After the kits ship we will start polishing our course and filming the sections that need to be filmed.

We’ll upload all the manufacturing pics and write a more detailed blog post about some of the tips and tricks we used someday soon.

Wish everyone a happy February!

–Cappie and Nancy

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

Additionally, we didn’t make it clear earlier — if you are in a country with a VAT, you are responsible for paying that tax. We think the t-shirts and stickers and posters count as gifts, but you may need to clarify with customs. We don’t think the kits count as gifts. We may end up not marking anything as a gift for simplicity and to make sure all the rewards arrive.

Thanks for your support as we work through these logistics and Happy New Year!

To give you some idea of what we’ve been up to, here are some pictures of the kickstarter backend for sending surveys:

Send Survey Overview

Survey View

Here are all the servos arriving:

Servos

Ack, EMAX (the servo company) shipped us the wrong screws despite us taking 2 days and a lot of emails to check that we were talking about the same screw. *sigh* well I guess we will just have to get another shipment from them.

And the boxes! Here are 150 boxes. Finding the kind we wanted involved us learning a lot of terminology (we wanted front-locking tabs, because it makes assembling the packages much easier to only need to tape one side, but the exact size we wanted required a custom die cut, so we went with a larger size than we needed because it was a standard size):

Boxes

Hope everyone’s holidays went awesomely! Cappie and I went home to Colorado and Georgia respectively for the holidays. This is what Boston looked like flying back in, there was so much snow:

Boston from airplane window

Happy New Year everyone!

–Cappie and Nancy

As you probably noticed the kickstarter ended a few days ago, and we successfully hit our stretch goal with a few hours to spare! Thanks so much everyone for all your support. We’re throwing in a fourth servo for those who are participating in the course and throwing in an extra sticker for everyone in thanks.

We are really excited to be able to build robots and share our love of engineering with so many people. We’re a little apprehensive, since we want things to be perfect for everyone, but as it’s very hard to predict how people will react to different styles of teaching we’ll give it give it our best and see what happens.

Now we go onwards into the future! We’ve already got a sample for the laser-cut pieces from E&M Labs in California and have firm quotes or have bought from our suppliers for all the other pieces, although we are still looking at our options for the 3d printed pen holder piece. We’re putting together a game plan for producing the course and are looking into options for filming in a quieter place than our day-to-day workspace.

As usual, here are some screenshots of the backend:

Funding Progress Graph

This time there’s actually a single source (sidebar, $229) cut-off from the bottom of the graph.

Please let us know if you have any questions. We’ll shortly send out surveys via Kickstarter to collect shipping information, email addresses, or t-shirt sizes as appropriate.

Merry xmas, those of you that celebrate it, and happy holidays to everyone else!

We wish you all great happiness and joy,

–Cappie and Nancy

p.s. Here are two talks about education that we found interesting: Sal Khan’s talk at MIT that started this whole project, and Blikstein and Sipitakiat’s talk about design principles for engineering education hardware.