X1Plus Expander e-mail receivers,
This will be a short update with just a few bits of exciting news. I’ll have more to come in a bit to wrap up the project but for now, a few headlines:
X1Plus Expander is in Stock for Immediate Shipment!
A few weeks ago, I had an absolute marathon in my office of packing and shipping and, at long last, I have shipped all 567 X1Plus Expander units to Mouser, along with all 297 Level Shifter Modules, all 243 Andon Modules, and all 102 Shutter Release Modules. (I also shipped 284 Mounting Brackets & Enclosures, but there are still 31 to go on those. They will arrive here in the next week or so and it should be pretty quick to turn those around back to Mouser and anyway there are enough of those that they’re in stock, too.) If you had a unit pre-ordered, my console says it has shipped by now!
But what this also means is that X1Plus Expander is in stock for immediate shipment at Crowd Supply! If you have been waiting to hand over your credit card number until something is ready to be shipped, well, today is that day. Looking at the numbers, there’re about 100 Expanders left that haven’t been spoken for yet, so if you want one, you should get on it soon.
X1Plus 3.1 is Released!
Hot on the heels of shipping the last Expanders, I’ve released X1Plus version 3.1, which squashes a few Expander-related bugs (in particular, around printing with Ethernet only, and adding a feature that I forgot to implement in 3.0 to display sensor data in the GUI), as well as a few non-Expander-related bugs. It also adds support for remote printing using Polar Cloud. If you have X1Plus installed already, you should get a prompt today to upgrade to 3.1, and I recommend that you say yes.
Send in Your Field Reports!
Now that there are a bunch of these out there in the world, if you do something cool with yours, I’d like to hear about it! And, as it turns out, not only would I like to hear about it, but Crowd Supply would too. If you write a Field Report about something cool you did using your Expander, you can send in a short report of what you did. If Crowd Supply likes it, they’ll give you a $50 credit towards the next thing you decide to back there, plus they will publish your report on their site and in their newsletter!
There’s a Little More to Come
Although this project is nearly at a close, I promised a handful of folks that I’d do some writing about what it takes to do this kind of thing. I definitely didn’t get rich doing this, but I definitely did learn a lot, so I thought it might be interesting to write a retrospective both on the things that I learned and on where your money goes in this kind of project. Watch this space…
And as always, thank you so much for your support and for making this possible. It’s really been an honor to have your trust in waiting patiently for your Expanders so far and even more of an honor to have gotten to deliver them to you.
Talk soon,
joshua