October Flutter update
about 9 years ago – Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 10:07:28 AM

Greetings all,

Payment for all rewards and open orders has been sent to China. I've been finalizing the board files to make sure everything is right for this big order, and will be confirming all files with the manufacturer shortly. The next step will be for them to do their thing, and if we don't have problems we should begin shipping things out in about 8 weeks.

PLEASE, do one thing. Log in to backerkit and check your address:

https://flutterwireless.backerkit.com/

If you've e-mailed me about an address change recently, I may not have put it in the system.

Thank you all for your kind support after the last update. Things are doing a little better for me. I'm excited to get this big shipment into everyone's hands.

Take care,

Taylor

Flutter is still alive
about 9 years ago – Mon, Sep 07, 2015 at 11:17:58 PM

TL;DR:

• Sorry I disappeared. Personal stuff. Needed time. Inconvenient I know.
• I have added up all the latest orders and send off the RFQ to the factory for all open orders. I expect to place that in the next week or two.
• Please, no new refund requests. I cannot afford to refund people and still get everyone their hardware. Refunds are more expensive than delivery.
• I love you.

Hello Flutter backers,

Greetings. It has been some time. I want to apologize for my absence. Many of you have rightfully been asking wtf is going on, and I have been unresponsive. That sucks, and you don't deserve that.

I will very briefly fill you in on why that has happened, and then tell you what is going on with the project. The good news is you WILL all be getting your stuff. I know I keep saying that, and it hasn't changed.

So, why did I disappear? Well, shortly after the last update, something happened in my personal life that really broke me down. For the last two years I have put all of myself into Flutter, and I had worked myself to the point of exhaustion. After this recent change, I had run out of steam. I've been focusing on two things for the last month or so: my job and myself. I've been bike riding, reading, and generally trying to be a human again after pushing myself way too hard. In addition to going through this personal stuff, I had to move and didn't have internet at my new place until recently. I absolutely could have taken my work laptop to a cafe to update you all, so I apologize for not making that effort.

Many of you are probably very unhappy with me. In fact, it's probably been that way for months. Well, I don't blame you. As far as I am concerned I have failed with Flutter. I wasn't cut out for solo entrepreneurship. Yes, I can make the product, but entrepreneurship is a lot more than that.

Finally, I miscalculated the loan amount needed to get everything delivered, so I didn't quite have enough funds until recently when I secured a second loan. I will be paying off these debts for years to come, but there was no way in hell I was going to let you all down. You believed in me and gave me an opportunity to create something I still think is incredible, and I am still very excited to deliver. I learned a LOT in the last few years and I consider the debt something like student loan debt that many people my age have to pay off (at least in the US...).

I have to make one key point here: Now that the funds are all secured and I am ready to send them off to the manufacturer, I can no longer issue new refunds. It's more expensive for me to issue a refund than it is to send product, and with money tight I just cannot afford the extra expense. I hope you understand. There are some people I promised refunds to that I believe I still need to process, and those offers stand. If I have told you you will get a refund, I will issue it. If I haven't, please understand that in order to get everyone their hardware and meet my obligations without going broke, I need to just deliver you your hardware.

So, here we are. Very, very late, but not out of the game. What comes next?

We've gotten a lot of orders on the website in the past few months, so this morning I tallied them all up and added that to the quote request I had previously sent to our manufacturer. I sent the email off to them so I'm just awaiting final numbers, which should hopefully come in a couple of days. In this run we should be able to produce all hardware for all outstanding orders. We also have a distributor interested and I sent them pricing this morning, so fingers crossed we'll get someone else handling our orders soon enough.

I still haven't gone through all my back e-mails over the past 6 or so weeks. I will do that soon I expect. If you sent me an email and haven't gotten a response, expect something in the next week or two. Also, I know the password reset emails are not going out from our website, nor are the questions submitted via the web form. Looks like we have some issue with the email system there so I intend to look that over.

I do not have a lot of time to commit to Flutter right now, but I will find my groove and plan on taking at least one evening or day a week to keep things going. I still love Flutter, I just needed some time away. I will find a way to keep this running and my hope is that with distributors my role on shipments will be minimized. Then in time I will be working on improvements to the source code and IDE. There is much work to be done, but this platform still has a lot of power and value so I hope you will all consider the long wait worth it.

Thank you for being a part of my project and for understanding that I am still doing everything I can to get you your hardware.

Taylor Alexander

Good news everyone! All orders ship soon, USB support works, drones, and more.
over 9 years ago – Fri, Aug 07, 2015 at 11:37:50 PM

Good news everyone!

TL;DR:

• Manufacturing on all outstanding orders begins this month. We will be starting an order of roughly 3000 boards and breakouts, plus shields, starter kits, and shirts. Production should start this week for most items.
• I spent the last two months looking for funding, but couldn't talk about it till the deal was done. A couple of deals almost worked out and then fell through, but I have finally have funds in my account now for fullfillment of all orders.
• Lead time is 4-6 weeks for the bulk of the manufacturing, but it may take longer to fully kit all orders. I will try to squeeze in the Network Shield and Shield Shield but those may go out in separate shipments.
• We now have USB support working with Flutter, so you can use USB serial in your sketches. This means easier debugging plus support for Internet of Things applications and Android/iOS apps like Blynk. USB needs a little more testing but we will post an update when binaries are available.
• I've taken on a regular full time job. Trying to make Flutter pay the bills was just too hard as one person. I will continue to work on Flutter as a side project, relying on distributors for distribution and fullfillment so no one needs to wait on me. I will no longer need to spend time on sales and marketing and can focus all of my efforts on code improvements and documentation (which I know is sorely needed). Flutter is the coolest thing I've ever made and I plan to keep it growing.
• I'm building a drone with Flutter and could use a developer's help. I have all the systems working but my code needs more work. If you want to help please join the discussion on the message board.
• Flutter Scout has a 4-page spread in the August-September issue of Make Magazine. If you aren't a subscriber, make sure to get a copy! It should be on newsstands very soon if it isn't already. They've also posted the article online.
• I don't think I've shared this video of Scout yet. I used a tripod so it's better than some of my past Scout videos.

The full update:

After a long search, I have secured a loan sufficient to fullfill all open orders for Flutter customers - both Kickstarter rewards and pre-orders placed on Backerkit or our new store at FlutterWireless.com. All told we are ordering roughly 1700 Flutter Basics, 1050 Flutter Pros, 2800 Breakout kits, hundreds of shields, and all of the t-shirts and starter kits. The factory says there will be a 4-6 week lead time for the roughly 3000 Basic and Pro boards, but total lead time for delivery depends on how long it takes to fully kit each order as we don't plan to do double shipments. I may do a second shipment for some backers who orderd the Shield Shield and Network Shield, as those need a little bit more development and I don't want to hold orders up. I am still planning the shipments and will have more specific information soon.

I have been working since the beginning of May on this and spent time looking for traditional VC funds, investment from serial angel investors, and small loans from a handful of wealthy individuals. In the process I got to pitch Flutter to a group of savvy industry professionals and investors at SRI, chat about my options over lunch at MakerCon with Eric Klein from Lemnos Labs, meet at some lovely angels' homes in Silicon Valley, and even meet a dishonest "investor" who clamed to have $150k to offer me but is apparently some kind of conman. It's been fun! I've been very busy fundraising but was unfortunately unable to talk about it, as no good comes from announcing deals before they're closed. Well, the funds for this loan are now in my bank account, so this week I will get the order rolling!

In other news, I've been working with a developer on USB support for Flutter so you can do serial over USB in your Arduino Sketch. He has been writing all of the code, and I have been providing a little debugging and Linux troubleshooting support. We got it partially working two weeks ago and the developer (Doug Clauder) just told me today he thinks it's all 100% working now. I need to roll his changes into Flutter's code and test on Linux, but if you want to check out his USB code now, see his github. It's pretty quick for me to integrate with Flutter's code so I will be doing that this week. Look for another update on that this month.

USB support for Flutter is a big deal though, as it was one of the most significant missing features in our code. Even very simple things like checking if a sensor is working can be maddening without USB/serial, so I am thankful that we now have it working. This will allow you to print data to a serial terminal in your sketch for debugging, or just to bridge a Flutter connection to a PC. This means, for example, that we can now build Internet of Things applications with Flutter, and will soon be able to support cool Android and iOS apps like Blynk.

Another major update is that I have decided to take on a full time job, rather than continue doing only Flutter. Flutter has been an incredible ride and I have learned a lot, but some early mistakes meant that keeping cash flowing was difficult. With a steady job I can continue to run Flutter without stressing about where my money will come from. I'm not really able to talk about what I'm doing at the new job, but last week was my first week and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. The CEO thinks Flutter is cool and is happy for me to continue operating Flutter on the side, so that's exactly what I will do. Flutter is the coolest thing I've ever made and I want to it to both stay alive and continue to grow. I made Flutter for the community and I would still see it as a failure if I didn't get to the point where it was in stock at distributors and accessible to everyone.

There's a lot that can be done to improve Flutter on the software side and once there are over 4000 boards in the wild I think we can form a real community around its development. Not needing to force Flutter to pay my expenses means I don't need to focus nearly as much on sales and marketing and can just focus my efforts on improving the product. We'll be signing on new distributors soon who can do the bulk of our promotion and distribution.

We're also happy to announce that Make Magazine has printed a 4 page article I've written about the Flutter Scout vehicle. That's the August-September issue but it should be hitting newsstands and subscribers this week. They've also posted the article online. If you have a 3D printer, you absolutely should check out the updated Github repo with all of the latest Scout files!

Anyway, the big news is that everyone is getting their hardware, and soon. I am not the type to let people down, though I realize that I am often too ambitious. Flutter is in fact a solid harware platform, and I am so excited to get these boards in developers hands. Once this big shipment lands we should see a lot of exciting things happening on the software side.

Thanks for hanging in there, and I hope that when your hardware arrives you think it has been worth the wait. Looking at what is on the market today, I still think Flutter is one of the best Arduino-compatible boards you can get.

Boards arriving, new software, and more
over 9 years ago – Tue, Jul 07, 2015 at 03:18:15 PM

Greetings Flutterers!

First, a plug for a friend's Kickstarter. Check out Modulo with 30 hours left! Modulo works with Flutter and lets you build electronics in a modular way.

The first shipment of boards has begun arriving in customers hands, and we've uploaded the first ready to go software packages for Flutter for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Those links are on the new Getting Started tutorial for Flutter that I wrote last week.  I did find last night that I introduced a bug into the library code on Friday, which I fixed this morning. If you downloaded our library over the weekend, please download the latest version of our library from github or via this direct link.

I wanted to comment briefly on some dissatisfaction some of you have voiced with the shipment schedule. This was our first manufacturing run, and we started with the two simplest to manufacture boards - the Basic and the Breakout. To keep things simple and to avoid partial shipments, we only delivered to people whose order consisted of only those two boards. This means a few important groups got left out, including high tier backers and backers who pledged for early boards but upgraded one or more of those boards to the Pro.

I recognize that this shipment schedule is not ideal. I would have liked to deliver to the biggest and earliest backers first, but that just didn't work with how complex the higher tiers are. Most early backers did get shipments, unless they upgraded their Basic boards to the Pro.

This last shipment completely closes out around 30% of the Kickstarter rewards, without requiring any double shipments. We may end up doing double shipments in the future, but a batch of double shipments costs thousands of dollars, so we didn't want to do that when there were so many shipments that could be closed out.

The next manufacturing run will be a large batch of Pro and Basic boards, and they will be going out to the highest tier backers first, as well as any backers in the "Early Backer" tiers that were left out of the first shipment. Manufacturing for this will start in June and will ship in July.

Some of you are frustrated with the wait, and have asked about refunds. I want to make clear two things about that. One: No one in this campaign will be left out in the cold - you will all get your hardware or a refund. Two: I feel personally responsible when a backer is dissatisfied. You supported me and I've left you unhappy. I've found that sometimes the terms of these shipments can seem frustrating, but when I talk to backers we can often work out a deal. One backer didn't want the extra shields in their reward, so we've agreed to swap those out for extra boards. If you are frustrated, please e-mail me at [email protected] and let's talk about it. I may not always be able to help right away, but I will try.

Speaking of e-mail, I will be out of the office this week and away from an internet connection. I will resume normal work next Monday. If you have any issues, please check out the community forum for help.

This is just the beginning for Flutter. Now that we have a basic Getting Started tutorial we will begin releasing documentation for the API along with many more examples. Look for much more of that this month.

Thank you as always.

Taylor

Post Maker Faire Update - First 1000 units have shipped!
over 9 years ago – Fri, Jun 05, 2015 at 06:33:06 PM

TL:DR;

• The first 1000 units have shipped! Boards shipped last week but it looks like tracking numbers were not automatically e-mailed so I will do that tomorrow.
• We have a new website with a new store. Check it out and PLEASE do us a favor and share it on social media! FlutterWireless.com
• We have been using twitter a lot too. Follow us!
• We are retiring our old blog and have set up a new one on our community forum.
• We have some more details about faster data rates and mesh, see below.
• Flutter Scout, our first 3D printed robot, has gotten a major redesign and will be featured in the next issue of Make Magazine! Scout now has an official page on our wiki and an introduction post in our blog. Scout's design files should be up by the end of next week, so check back.
• We've gotten two new shields back from the manufacturer and we've written up full details with pictures and video here.
• I uploaded a nice video of Flutter running off of a solar panel here.

Maker Faire is over! It was a REALLY busy past couple of weeks for us, so it's nice for that to be over.

Now that the boards are out in the mail and Maker Faire is over, my focus is back on the business. That's mostly software, sales, and production.

Our software is in an alpha stage - basic communications works great but there is very little to the API right now, with only few options for wireless behavior.

In the next few months we'll be adding major new features to Flutter. We'll be offering multiple data rates in firmware up to 1mbps, and hope to release the beginnings of a mesh firmware this summer. USB functionality is still limited to programming only, but we have community developers working on the issue. Once we enable USB in user sketches it will be easy to connect a Flutter network to the internet (for now you need an FTDI adapter).

This is still an early release, but Flutter will improve over time. If you have specific questions please ask in our community forum.

Now that the first shipment has gone out, many backers are eager to know when the other rewards will be shipping. We will be going in to production with the Pro boards soon, but are waiting a little while longer just to make sure everything goes well with the first shipment. 

We do have the Explorer board essentially finalized now. We're using new connectors (Seeed studio "Grove" system) that have a bunch of readily available sensors that plug right in, so we're really excited about that.

While the Explorer is nice, the board I'm REALLY excited about is our new Remote Control.

The Remote Control has 12 buttons total, two I2C ports for displays, sensors, or more, four analog axes and an open source design.

Read more about the new boards on the blog post here.

I know everyone is excited to get their hardware and I know the next few months will be frustrating for people as you all wait to get your shipments, but we will ship them out in time and we cannot wait to get all Kickstarter pledges delivered.

Thanks again backers, and please if you can, share our website and follow us on twitter.

Also check out the post on Scout!