I’m here in Oslo with @Elias_Bakken , and just as I arrived, he had a small box on his desk.
What was inside, you ask?
The first developer prototypes of Revolve. The pre-series meant to be testing the Revolve design in depth more than the proof of concept demoed at MRRF.
I can already hear the “When can I pre-order one?” questions coming. The answer is: we can’t really tell at the moment. First, the software running on it right now needs a whole lot of work. Developers will be getting their boards in the coming week(s?) to get started, but there aren’t many of them, and most of us have day jobs that take up our time.
Then there’s the fact that until we’ve managed to really run through long prints with the board, and validate that the components and PCB actually hold up under stress, it’d be inconsiderate to manufacture more. You don’t want a board that’s not going to work as you expect, do you?
So in short, yes, the project is moving forward, and we’ll try to keep you up to date when we have important milestones to share about this development. The big news today is, yes, some Revolve boards exist. They boot, and they basically move motors and react to endstops as they should. But there may be some issues that will come up to be resolved before we can push for a full-on production run.
And for those of you with Replicapes, don’t worry, we’re still pushing for a new release of the software before we shift our efforts to Revolve-centric development.
Yes, I’ve been hoping to see these in production since I saw the prototype at MRRF. It’s been tough showing off my printers and having to tell people that they can’t buy a Replicape for love or money.
So for those of you who aren’t on Slack, or aren’t paying attention to the development channel, here’s a quick news update with what’s been told publicly.
The Revolve is a couple months (or less now?) away from a production run by Seeed studios. The design for the board has been finalized, and as I understand it, @Elias_Bakken has little to do on the HW side. So he’s now working almost full time on getting Umikaze ready for Revolve.
Where’s the Replicape-only update? That’s a good question. And I wish I had a good answer.
There’s been a fair amount of dissention within the development team for a while, which slowed things down a lot.
Recently it came to a head, and we had to unfortunately ask someone to leave the project’s core team. While his intentions were good, the vision we had of what to build, and how, didn’t align.
We’re still trying to come back into a faster development cycle from that difficult episode, and unfortunately most of the developpers’ professional lives haven’t helped in that regard either. I won’t speak for the others, but on my end, it’s been a difficult period. And it’s not over yet - I work in a startup, and the amount of time they eat up is not an exaggeration.
For the bravest among you, there is an Umikaze 3.0 RC image available - but remember that one is built for the Revolve. I don’t know that we even have complete change logs for it yet. So come on Slack in the development channel if you want to use it. But it does work, and relatively well.
I’m back to working on a Replicape image for now, as I took a 2-week stay-cation.
