Making LoRa cheaper, more accessible and hackable using your favourite single board computers - Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Micro:Bit!
Hi all,
Further to our last update we have now sent the address lockdown emails.
You now have 48 hours until the addresses are fully locked down so please check them and amend if necessary.
Thanks,
The Pi Supply team
Hey all,
Just a quick one today to provide you an update on surveys and shipping.
We are planning to start shipping in a few weeks time, so on Wednesday 1st May we will be sending the "48 hour lockdown" notification emails out on BackerKit. This will give you 48 hours to update your address details and then they will be locked down and finalised ready for us to ship out.
After that we will then import them into our shipping / fulfilment software. We will be shipping all of these units directly from our warehouse in the United Kingdom. Luckily Brexit has been temporarily delayed (yay!) - so in the interim it makes most sense for speed of shipping to backers (and taxes/duties) for us to ship directly from here.
As you know from previous updates, production has taken longer than anticipated however we are very close now. Our schedule for when we should start to receive product into us, given to us by our manufacturer, is as follows:
Coming mid May:
Coming end of May/Early June:
Coming around 4 to 6 weeks later (as soon as we can get more RAK833):
500 x IoT LoRa Gateway (frequency split TBC)
Of course, as always, we will bring this in sooner if we can...we will ship as soon as possible. And if anything changes we will keep you posted.
Thanks,
The Pi Supply team
Hey all,
Apologies for the severely overdue update...we have had a lot going on behind the scenes here with the completion of the prototyping (for the Arduino Node Shield), the completion of the accessory boards (IP67 case HAT holder and I2C GPS board - see below for more info) and ramp up of manufacture of the LoRa boards as well as a number of events we have been at.
However we appreciate that is no excuse - we hope that this update makes up for it a little bit and we will endeavour to provide more timely updates on manufacture and shipping in the coming weeks.
We recently attended an educational event in Malaysia, called Bett Asia which was kindly paid for by the UK government as we were on the Department for International Trade (DIT) stand with a number of other fantastic UK based companies. We also had the opportunity to visit the British High Comissioner's Residence in Kuala Lumpur for a reception event - which was a very interesting evening. You can see some pictures from the events below - with our LoRa boards on display:
On the way back, and because we were already in South East Asia, we decided to take the opportunity to visit a number of our suppliers in Shenzhen and Taiwan. We have worked with some of our suppliers for nearly 7 years and have never met!
Perhaps our most important and valued supplier is Sunsoar Tech - who we have worked with since the very beginning of our company (interestingly we started working with them shortly after they had started export business themselves). Our friend from the Raspberry Pi community Joe Walnes (who created the original Pi Crust board design) recommended them to us after a visit to their factory back in 2013.
Sunsoar manufacture the vast majority of our kits and boards - and help us with a vast array of other things such as sourcing. They also manufacture boards for a number of other companies in the maker community - including RasPiO, 4tronix, PiBorg, ModMyPi, BuyaPi and others (a lot of them either directly or indirectly through our recommendations!).
This visit to Sunsoar also tied in nicely with the production of our IoT LoRa Boards...as they were running some of our Gateway HAT boards through their assembly lines at the time of our visit - meaning we could get a bunch of pictures and videos for you all!
Sunsoar have their PCB assembly lines on site and they part-own a PCB factory about an hour away. We headed to the PCB factory first....where the process all begins. We won't go into all the detail of how a PCB is made here, as it is quite a lengthy process and takes a considerable amount of explaining - as well as the fact that there are plenty of explanations out there that are far better than we could ever do!
So on that note, if you are interested in learning more about how it happens, I would highly recommend this text and video guide from EuroCircuits (on a side note - if you ever need quick-turn PCBs making, with a cool web-based PCB visualiser we can highly recommend EuroCircuits).
However, here are some pictures and short videos of some of the processes and machines at the PCB factory:
After the PCB factory we then headed back to the main Sunsoar factory to look at the PCBA line where our Gateway HATs were being produced. This board uses both surface mount and through hole components so for this board we use both lines, however in the below videos and pictures it is just the surface mount and not the through hole line, on which they were running our boards through.
In this first video, Vicky (our account manager from Sunsoar) shows us around:
You can see a few more pictures and videos of the factory below:
Once the boards are finished and they emerge from the reflow oven, they then go through to the through hole line. After that is all finished, they will go to be programmed and tested and then go through to final packaging where the RAK833 module, stickers, antennas, info cards and mounting hardware are all added and then everything is boxed up, ready to be shipped over to us in the UK!
Last but not least, on our trip in Shenzhen we also visited our friends from RAKwireless, whose LoRa modules are at the heart of our boards. It was great to meet their team and see some of the new products they are working on. You can see us with Kinson and Nancy below:
And if you need any help with PCB manufacture or electronics assembly - definitely get in touch with Sunsoar (http://www.sunsoartech.com/) and tell them we sent you!
We have been making some good progress on the accessory boards. Last week, we got the prototype PCBs for the IP67 carrier case which you can see below:
We will be getting this tested as soon as possible (it is a simple board, so should work first time!) and then into production.
The I2C GPS board design is nearly finished as well, and we will be ordering the first prototype PCBs in the next week or two.
More updates on both these as we make more progress.
As you know from the campaign, our estimated target was to ship by the end of March. Due to a delay in receiving some of the components, this estimate was unfortunately thrown off. However, as we are now making good progress we are hoping to ship by the end of April everything apart from the IP67 case / carrier boards and I2C GPS boards.
If you backed on BackerKit for an IP67 case or I2C GPS board (for the nodes) then we will ship everything else in your pledge first, and ship the rest of the stuff separately around a month later when the I2C GPS boards and IP67 case carriers are ready. There will be no additional shipping charges for this split shipping.
We are planning to lock down the addresses on BackerKit in around 1 week from now. We will send you out a 48 hour warning email before we lock down. If you need to change any details now, you can do so at http://lora.backerkit.com
Thanks for your patience so far. We are really looking forward to getting these shipped and seeing what you all do with them :-)
All the best,
Aaron the and Pi Supply team
Hi all,
We have been very busy here getting things ready to ship for you, preparing surveys, sourcing add ons and attending the things conference. Here is a bit about what we have been up to...
As mentioned in a few previous updates, we were visiting The Things Conference in Amsterdam to share our ideas and products with the LoRa community. This is a conference entirely dedicated to LoRaWAN and IoT. This event is organised by The Things Network and they did an amazing job. It was attended by over 1500 people which meant we were extremely busy over the whole two days despite having a team of 5 people there. We ran two workshops with Balena and were interviewed live on camera for the live stream coverage.
We had an amazing time and met loads of great people...including some of our backers....and we had a huge amount of interest in our products. If you came to say hi - it was lovely to meet you. If you missed out, here is our roundup video:
We will be attending a number of events over the coming year and beyond, so if you didn't manage to make this one, we look forward to hopefully meeting you in the future.
The board production is well underway - with the Gateway HATs finished all but final assembly and all of the nodes in various stages of production.
We hope to have some pictures and other data to share with you soon from the production. But the good thing is we are currently still on track to ship in March.
We have now received survey replies on BackerKit from all but 23 of the 288 backers. If you are one of the people who has not yet replied - we would be really grateful if you could fill in your survey as soon as possible.
We still aim to be shipping in March, and we will need to have your address details in order to send the pledge items!
If you need to update your address, you can do so until we lock down the addresses (we will give you at least 48 hours notice before we do this).
Thanks,
Aaron and the Pi Supply team
Hi all,
Just wanted to send a quick update to ask you all not to worry that surveys have not been sent out yet.
Basically, BackerKit has changed since we last used it and you now have to request a setup review, and once that is done you then have to do a "smoke test" - i.e. send out the survey to about 5% of the backers and make sure there are no issues.
So it will take a little longer to receive your surveys than we thought.
As soon as the surveys have all gone out we will send another update so that if you have not got the survey at that point you can let us know. Sorry for any confusion!
Thanks and happy new year!
The Pi Supply team