Hey guys,

Just wanted to give you a quick update on the status of the Positron kits!

…But before I get to that, if you haven’t pre-ordered, you still have time! I have 5 kits left in stock. Don’t worry if when you go to order it says they are on back order, that is normal. I’ll update that page to state the orders are for the next run when I finally run out of kits for this run.

I expect the few remaining kits will be sold out by the end of June, so act fast if you want in on this run!

Now, back to the update:

First, everything’s going great, but things are a bit behind schedule. There were a number of unforeseen obstacles along the way that caused delays though, some of which I mentioned before and some I haven’t yet.

I mentioned in an earlier post for example how I had to find a new source for the vibration motors because my old manufacturer no longer wanted to supply small quantities.  I overcame that and ordered enough spares that I won’t have to worry about sourcing those again for the next several runs.

But issues with getting certain parts didn’t end there. The next issue I ran into was that when my PCB manufacturer finally got around to ordering the parts for the bards, three different chips I use… for driving the LEDs on the bargraph, the powercell, and the main strobe… had all gone out of stock. And after calling TI and the distributors they insisted should have thousands and having no luck there, I managed to find some in Europe and bought up their remaining stock.

Then, when I received the bargraphs in the mail from China, they looked like this:

It took me two days to straighten all those pins out by hand with needle-nose pliers!

All those troubles are behind us now of course, but the delay in getting the parts to my PCB manufacturer did mean that I didn’t receive the last of the boards for the kits until this past Friday.

And because I was busy putting out all those little fires, I myself am behind on assembling all the LEDs and switches and  doing the rest of the stuff that needs to be done to put the kits in the mail.

But I’ve got all the parts now, as you can see here:

And you can see above that I’ve assembled all the toggle switches for 43 kits, and yesterday I finished up all the black pushbuttons, and today the red pushbuttons will be done.

Once all the switches are done though, I’ve still gotta do a ton of 3mm LEDs (5 per kit), and assemble enough cylotron LED cables, slo-blo LED cables, volume pots for 43 kits, as well as crimp the connectors on their vibration motors, program the boards, format the SD cards, and assemble the power switch and charge ports. Whew!

I’m working as fast as I can, but it’s just gonna take a bit more time.

At this point, I think the kits will be ready to ship around the 22nd, but obviously if I can have them ready sooner I’ll ship them as soon as they’re done.

So that’s all for this update… Back to the grindstone!