It's been awhile since our last post, if you've been following us on Twitter you'll know that this week our Kickstarter campaign finished (thank you everyone!) and we placed our final order for hardware.

We've done 4 rounds of prototyping up to this point under the code name "MAN BEAR PIG". The MBP4 was our final prototype and validated the design. To keep the turnaround time minimal we had a Chinese company produce the PCBs with next day shipping. We reflowed one PCB and everything worked so it's go time.

A last second issue popped up while placing the final order. Our switching buck regulators were suddenly out of stock. There are plenty of fixed buck regulators out there that meet our specs, but none in at TSOT-25 footprint with matching pin outs. For some reason the pins are non-standard on our regulator. We were either stuck with a 16 week lead time (if it's not discontinued) or a re-design of the power supply. To avoid a MBP5, we bought out all stock from Digikey and Mouser and will consign those to the fab. As of this evening we have tracking information for both packages, catastrophe avoided!