Create fun, electronic devices each month with guided tutorials and helpful community; first kit includes parts to build a wifi robot.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Hi Kickstarter backers,
We hope you’re doing well! We wanted to keep you in the loop about our progress since we delivered our first kit in December. Here’s what you can expect from this update:
1) Progress since the first kit delivery
2) New kit delivery schedule + promo code (“kickstarter” for 20% off)
3) Learning Platform, Instructions, Tutorials, Forum
4) Accolades
5) What’s next?
Let's get to it.
1) Progress since the first kit delivery
Since December / January, we’ve delivered the wifi-robot, LED cube, and are in the process of delivering the electronic compass kit.
We’ve made considerable progress on the manufacturing side of the project and significantly reduced our lead times. This means we can produce kits faster without compromising on quality. This also means we can deliver when we say we’re going to deliver. That has been a top priority for us.
2) New kit delivery schedule + promo code
For those of you interested in learning about our revised delivery schedule, here are the kits we plan to deliver this year.
For those of you interested in going beyond the wifi-bot and checking out other projects, you may subscribe at www.thimble.io. For 20% off any subscription tier, please use the promo code ‘kickstarter’.
3) Learning Platform, Instructions, Tutorials, Forum
A lot of time and effort has gone into producing the instructions and video tutorials for each project on the learning platform. Despite that, we’ve received a lot of constructive feedback on improving them. We’ve learned that some of the instructions need to be simpler; we’ve also learned not to assume that anyone has any prior knowledge in electronics.
We’re also working on making the programming a bit easier to absorb by providing more step-by-step instructions. We realize we made a promise to teach beginners and we’re going to stand by it.
Here’s an example of a video clip for our next project: the electronic compass. We’ve added close-ups, better audio, and different camera angles to really see what’s going on in the project.
4) Accolades + Takeaways
Took 1st place in our category at SXSW and 2nd Overall: We’re proud of a few accomplishments and thought you should know about them. We attended SXSW - a technology festival in Austin, TX and took first place in a startup competition called SXSW Startup Pitch Accelerator. The category we competed in was World Innovation Technology. We’re extremely humbled and excited to win this award considering the competition. Because of this competition, we were able to connect with Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels, who's interested in partnering with us and even tweeted about our win at SXSW. Here’s a picture of David and me on stage. The prize included $4k, PR, and free tickets to next year’s festival.
Telluride Venture Accelerator: We’re currently part of Telluride Venture Accelerator in Telluride, CO. For those of you who may be unaware of what an accelerator is, it’s a four month program that offer startups a specific amount of capital in exchange for mentorship and equity. We’re here for four months to spend even more time on the business and expanding our network. We’re surrounded by mentors, advisors, and other companies that are trying to grow their companies as well. Here’s a link in case you’d like to learn more about the program and current companies:
Takeaways
One thing we learned throughout this process: If we had to do it all over again, we would have extended our delivery date by an additional six months to accommodate the extra orders beyond our goal and promised to deliver a kit every other month until we got a good grasp of the production process (which has taken us about 4 kits). Starting with kit #4, we will be consistently delivering a kit every month without any delays. For those of you who have stuck by our side, thank you so much!
5) What’s next?
Although we’re focusing on the delivery model, we have big plans to continue pushing forward.
If you need anything in the mean time, please reach out to us at [email protected]. We’re trying to limit support to this one email address so everything is one place. It helps us get back to you as soon as possible.
Thanks everyone!
Best,
Oscar & David
Hi everyone,
Just a quick holiday update!
Kits are still going out but we wanted to keep you in the loop on the learning portion of the site for those of you who have received your kits.
We wanted to wait until everyone received their kits to launch the learning app but totally understand that some of you want to start building asap. We also experienced some high volume on the site over the weekend so we wanted to make some updates to the site so it could handle the traffic.
Part 1 of the learning app is live now. Here is the link: Thimble Learning Platform
This part covers the assembly of the robot as well as controlling the motors from the Uno board.
Part 2 will be live end of this week with instructions on programming the ultrasonic sensor, wifi-module, and the controller app to move the robot around remotely. We'll also organize a few webinars to go over the robot build in more detail in case you'd like to follow along with us and other Thimblers.
If the real-time webinar interests you, let us know by filling out this survey so we can reach out to you with the details: link to survey
For those of you that haven’t still received your kits, we’re continuing to ship them this week. We’ll have updates for you as soon as we have more information on status from ShipBob (our fulfillment partner.) Thanks again for your patience.
Thanks and Happy holidays!
Oscar and Dave
Hi everyone!
Oscar and Dave here from Thimble.
As promised, we want to keep you in the loop about our progress this week. We wanted to let you know that tomorrow (Dec 15th), all kits start to ship out! We are so excited to ship out the wifi-robot! Labels and tracking numbers are already being generated as we write this update and since there are close to 2,000 backers, we’ll be sending out tracking numbers in a staggered fashion so everything runs smoothly.
As far as how the last phase went, the kits were shipped to Brooklyn this past Monday. It took about 1-2 days to arrive; we were given various shipping options and we ended up going with express shipping since we want to get these kits in your hands asap!
Once the kits arrived in NYC, it took about 1 day for the kits to clear customs. Thanks to our manufacturer, we hired a trucking company to ship everything to our warehouse in Brooklyn where they arrived yesterday morning. Today, the shipment was organized in the warehouse and we worked with the amazing and kind ShipBob staff to coordinate shipments going out tomorrow.
Here is how the shipment was broken down:
Here are some pictures of shipment coming in:
Although kits are going out, we’re still working hard to make sure everything is just right. We’ve been double checking everything to make sure names align with the right SKUs. We'll be updating you again within the next few days to ensure all kits go out. The updates won't stop once we finish delivering. We'll make sure everyone has received their kits and understand the process for logging onto the learning platform. We'll have more information this weekend so you know what to expect.
This is a big moment for us and we couldn't have done it without you. We'll never stop thanking you for your patience. If you have any questions, please reach out to [email protected]. We will try to get back to you asap.
We'll be in touch in a few days.
Thank you again!
Oscar and Dave
Hi everyone,
Thanks again for your patience as we continue to make progress with delivering your first Thimble project. We are finally delivering in December! Here are the following items we’ll cover in this update so you’re aware of everything we’ve been doing.
Here we go!
November update:
If you didn’t receive November updates, here is a link to a dropbox folder with an attachment. We received a few complaints that folks weren’t receiving Kickstarter updates. So we created a newsletter list in November and sent out an update to your emails. However, there were still a few of you that didn’t receive them. What we’ll do from now on is post updates on Kickstarter and also send them out via email so we don’t miss anyone.
Shipping:
Our Kickstarter campaign ended on February 6th, 2016 and we are finally shipping this month. We know it has been a rather long wait and we wholeheartedly appreciate your patience throughout this journey. Here is the proposed delivery schedule:
Our priority is to get every single kit out before the 17th so kits arrive in time for Christmas. We'll be working with our fulfillment partner in person to ensure everything goes smoothly. We won't leave the warehouse until every kit gets shipped.
What took so long?
We covered this in the November update but ultimately, it came down to what’s known as a testing fixture. Shortly after receiving the UNO boards in October, we learned that we needed to create a testing fixture so we could test every single electrical component that comes in your first kit. Normally, this is a quality control measure taken to ensure all parts are electrically sound. Tested parts would include the printed circuit board (PCB), motors, the Uno board, and wifi-module (ESP-8266).
We've enclosed a few pictures so you can take a good look at it.
As you might gather, there was no question as to whether we would do this; Dave and I committed to making an effective test procedure to ensure delivery of high quality kits. We knew it may mean at least 1-2 more months of delays but we’d rather delay than have you receive a faulty product. That would be the ultimate nightmare.
By the end of November, we created the testing fixture from scratch and once the designs were complete, we ordered the printed circuit boards. There was a slight (~2 week) lead time here for the boards to be manufactured and we finally received the fixtures, built them, wrote the procedures for our manufacturer, and shipped it to them. Now that our manufacturer has the fixtures, they have tested all electrical parts; so far, there is nothing wrong with any of the the PCB, motors, or wifi-module. As you can imagine, this is a huge relief for us because we now know that we’re sending out sound components. Now that this phase is over, the electrical parts will be sent to the warehouse in Brooklyn, New York where they will be joined with the rest of the wifi-robot kit parts and sent to you.
Learning Platform:
The learning platform has been complete since September 14th, we’ve been making small tweaks thanks to beta testers. If you’d like to take a look at what the platform looks like, please feel free to check it out here. For all beta testers that received solder badges, we hope you enjoyed building alongside the tutorials. Thank you again for your feedback.The wifi-robot tutorials have been recorded, edited, and will go up during the next two weeks. Here are some screenshots of the learning platform:
Future projects:
Part of what makes Thimble a challenging project is understanding the manufacturing lead times for each kit. Now that we’ve experienced what it takes to get a product to market, we know exactly what we need to do. The LED cube, compass, wifi-lightswitch, and piano are already in production. The production schedule we created earlier this year has been very helpful in keeping to deadlines (and quickly recognizing, mitigating risks, and correcting when we miss). We believe we have now established a very efficient process to bring our kits from idea to design to manufactured and tested product. David has been working hard to automate as much of this process as possible. Here are pictures of the LED cube sample which have gone into mass production this month:
Communication:
There's no doubt that this has been a long journey and some of you have been a bit skeptical about the amount of time it took us to deliver on this project. We haven't gone anywhere - nor do we plan to - we're here and we're putting our heart, mind, and soul into this project. We hope the last 16 updates have illustrated to some degree what the process has been like and how's it coming to life. At this point, we'll be posting updates every 7 days up until we deliver. (We mean it!) Once we've delivered the first kit, we'll go back to monthly updates so we're not bombarding your inbox.
We respond to every email and comment (even if it’s a negative comment coming our way). We’re committed to keeping you in the loop every step of the way.
Our apologies once again that this has taken as long it has. At this point, we hope the first kit and shipment will speak for itself. If you have any questions, please reach out anytime. You'll be hearing from us a week from today.
Thank you!
Best,
Oscar and Dave