X1Plus Expander buyers and non-buyers,
About a month ago, I wrote to you to say that the first 48 Expanders left my house. Since then, a bunch of you have been telling me that Expanders have been arriving! I’m happy to say that, so far, I’ve sent enough Expanders (and accessories!) to Mouser to fulfill all orders placed during the campaign period — and they should be shipping out in the next few days. Folks who ordered after the campaign period should have their Expanders shipping out in the next few batches, probably over the course of the next month — I’ll be speaking at Crowd Supply’s Teardown conference next weekend, and I’ll get back to boxing up more units as soon as I get back. (Uh, also, my apologies to my Crowd Supply project team for making them proofread this update at the last second while they’re scrambling to get Teardown set up. Unsung heroes behind this campaign: the whole team at Crowd Supply who made this possible, and especially Chris, Kelly, Fred, and Brendan. Thank you all so much.)
It is SO EXCITING to see y’all getting your boxes and posting pictures as you open them and set them up. I thought that getting boxes in the mail would be the biggest feeling of relief in this whole program, but actually, having people successfully install them has been even more rewarding. When you get yours, please be sure to jump on the Discord and show me! Pictured above is a collage of some of my favorite photos from Expander users in the field so far… (thanks: mowcius, WillowWisp, sims_60, Wolf on Air, andypiper!)
To celebrate, since things seem to be going well for all the X1Plus 3.0 release candidate users, I’ve just today released X1Plus version 3.0 through X1Plus’s over-the-air update system so that everyone can easily install the software needed to drive Expander. And coming soon, I hope to shoot some video with an installation guide — probably after I get back from Teardown?
Behind the scenes: how Expander was made
What this means, of course, is that now that the boxes are actually out there in the public, I can post pictures of the manufacturing process here. I haven’t actually been showing you pictures here because I wanted the boxes to be a surprise, but now…behind the scenes! Below, some photos of how the whole thing went together.
Peanut inspects production sample boxes.
650 custom ping-pong balls arrive. This was approximately the moment at which I started to question my sanity… for the fiftieth time.
I got really sick of folding boxes by hand and Googled to see how the pros did it. The answer is that they buy $800 laser-cut jigs from a manufacturer that makes videos that look like this. Instead of buying one for $800, I spent $0.30 in plastic and $800 in engineering time, and made my own, and then did my own takeoff video in the same style.
My mom happened to be in town! I put her to work packing boxes.
She came over to take a picture of me testing and labeling boards, while she packed boxes. The action of her walking over, of course, made sure that the next board that I tested failed, and she captured a candid expression of dismay on my face. But you should be happy to see this failure! It means that my testing actually works, and that it’s screening out bad boards.
The situation in my office / lab starts to get serious.
A carton of Expanders gets sealed up to head off to Mouser.
While I was in Shenzhen, I took a visit over to see Dr. Tao and Gushun Chen over at Bambu!
I didn’t take many pictures while I was there, for obvious reasons. But I did give them an Expander, and, more importantly, I got to visit the most important employee in the company, and gave her a gift, too.
Thank you all so much for your support of the Expander program. This has been a lot of fun to bring it to life for all of you. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with how you’re using yours — and if you’re at Teardown, please come say hi!
Talk soon,
joshua