Posted by Mechanical Design Labs on Oct 27, 2022 • 4:42PM PDT
Your Author Clock is Getting a Bigger Brain
Hello Everyone! It's time again for our monthly update on the Author Clock. A lot of progress has been made and we can sense the excitement rising among our backers so let's dive right in on what we've been up to.
Delivery Timeline
Since it is our most often requested update let's start with expected delivery. Our last estimate had us potentially shipping out units to the first Author backers by the end of the year. I am sorry to say that we are not going to meet that end of year shipping goal we had set for ourselves. We have gotten questions around whether the units will arrive in time for Christmas, and based on where we are now, units will not ship by then.
We were making great progress, so what happened? There is a very straightforward reason the timeline was delayed. The microcontroller chip we were using, the "brain" of the Author Clock electronics was declared to be end-of-life by the manufacturer. They will cease manufacturing it and discourage any new products from using it. Instead, they have rolled out a new generation of chips they encourage us to use. These chips are not a "drop-in" replacement, and required reworking the boards to accommodate the change in geometry and capabilities.
We have already implemented the changes, and received the first version of the new boards a few days ago, with initial tests showing the changes worked. There is more work to do to ensure everything is working adequately, but we anticipate we'll have locked the design by the end of November. At that point we have to requote with manufacturers in the lead up to mass production.
We can't say with certainty when we'll be ready to ship until the manufacturer reviews everything, but with Chinese New Year on the horizon, where manufacturing shuts down for the month of February, there is reason to anticipate shipments would begin in March 2023.
Although this is an unfortunate and even frustrating delay, internally we all agreed it is better that it happened now when we had time to address it. If we had completed partial manufacturing before the change there would be chaos to change the design halfway through production. Not to mention the added complications with remotely updating different versions of the hardware. This way, all backers gets the more modern electronics, which as you'll see below, is not all bad!
The Upside
Although this unforeseen change took the wind out of our sails a little bit we do have some good outcomes from it. The biggest upside is that with the Author Clock electronics design now being on the cutting edge of modern microcontrollers, we have made the decision to offer a two year no-questions-asked warranty to all backers to make up for the delays. We've always stood behind the quality of our work, and with this warranty we can show you how confident we are in the final product you'll be receiving.
Another significant impact of the chip change is that this new version is three times more power efficientwhen idle between screen updates. Although we'll need to test extensively, we anticipate a significant increase in battery life! As a refresher, we previously expected three weeks of battery life between recharges for the small clock and two months for the large, once we get more details we'll publish new battery metrics, but expect those in the next few updates!
New Quotes and Translations
A big task we are undertaking simultaneously as the above is the Translations Stretch Goal. Below you can see a graphic of our progress since we hired the three language translators we discussed in the last update.
Our translators have been picking up speed with a cumulative 6,500 translations so far. However, with the pace of new incoming quotes and our expected delivery date deadlines we are doubling the translating team to two translators per language for a total of six! It's the only way we can ensure the first version of Author ships with a completed language set!
As you can see below, since we last published our statistics, we have added over 2,000 quotes to the list, for a total of nearly 11,000 quotes mentioning the time. At an approximate 762 pages, reading all of Author is equivalent to reading three books in a row!
When we last published these numbers, there were about 250 times that had a single quote and would be shown every day, we're now down to 156 times with a single quote. About half of those are in the small hours of the night, when most people are sleeping. This means that not only are we adding more Authors and Books, we are diversifying every minute of the day, for an increasingly small chance of seeing repeated quotes.
In the future we may publish the times with a single quote as a challenge for backers to find alternatives! We've been consistently surprised by the engagement of our backers, and the pace at which you keep finding new quotes. We really could not have done this without you.
Quote Submission Winners
We have two winners to announce this month since last month was the special "missing times" submission drawing. The first winner is:
Winner #16 – Sarah Rose Battles – For the submission:
The lit-up screen offered no information about the caller, but it did reveal that it was2:35 in the morning.
Shifting Sands, Ray Keating
And the second winning submission is:
Winner #17 - Laura Borgman - For the submission:
Still unable to sleep, Tengo was sitting on the floor, listening to the Duke Ellington record at low volume, when the phone rang again. The hands of the clock were pointing to 10:12.
1Q84, Haruki Murakami
Congratulations to both of you! We will message you directly and thanks for your submissions!
You can still join in and contribute to the Author Clock by submitting your quotes at the link below! Over 8000 quotes have been submitted so far!Every month we have a drawing to select a quote submission to win a free Author Clock!
The new submission page now accepts photo uploads, so you don't need to type out the quotes!
Address Updates
One final thing we wanted to reiterate is thatyou do not need to have your address updated just yet. Once your unit is ready to ship we'll send you a notification confirming the delivery address, you'll be able to make changes then and we will not ship without your final confirmation. That means you don't need to worry about updating your address for now!
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It's now been one year since we launched the Author Clock campaign on Kickstarter. If you had asked me back then, I would have expected Author would be available in store shelves by now. That dream hasn't quite become a reality yet but on the other hand, I would have been blown away to see how far the design and quote list have now come, with added languages, upgraded screens and so much more. And it has all been thanks to you.
Whatever your interests, there's an Indiegogo community for you. Now you can find even more projects that are interesting to you. Just select your interests in your Indiegogo profile.
