Better late than never, here’s a look at where everything is at during the halfway mark of the year.
HARDWARE PREORDERS:
Due to some unexpected delays in international freight, and also local weather conditions, final validation prototypes of an improved Bridge6 and Bridge4 layout are finally enroute. We have enough current stock of Bridge4’s to ship all pre-orders this week. Bridge6’s will hopefully be shipping in a few weeks pending the enclosure clearing customs without any issues.
Once this initial wave of pre-order shipments has been sent, we hope to have regular stock of both Bridge4’s and Bridge6’s available with dispatch times being shortened to less than a week, so stay tuned.
Part of up-skilling ourselves for in-house PCB assembly has been the launch of the first product in our open-source range; MIDI Thru Gizmo. You can learn all about it on the product page as well as the design files if you’d like to make or modify it yourself. This was also delayed due to a holdup of 3.5mm adapters which most people opted to order. They have (finally) cleared customs and are en-route to us.
The Bridge4 and Bridge6 assembly had to wait until we had completed the MIDI Thru Gizmo assembly so that we could catch any issues in our assembly process and ensure we are shipping a high-quality product. That is now coming to fruition so manufacturing will be much faster and smoother in the future.
FIRMWARE
If you haven’t checked out the latest v1.1.0 beta, then you definitely should. Beta7 will be released later this week and is an absolute cracker bringing more stability fixes, new Smart Messages, and loads more. Most importantly, it contains many updates and fixes for our Device API communication which is used by the editor app.
APP
The app is finally taking shape how we always wanted it. Whilst delaying things in the short term, moving to a web-app and taking several steps backward at the start of the year has yielded many positive results including support across all major platforms (Windows, MacOS etc…) as well as a highly scalable platform for future products and updates. This means we can add new features and functions extremely quickly in a very stable manner.
We of course would have loved to have this out sooner, but we think it will be well worth the wait. We don’t have an exact timeframe for release yet, however we’ve done a lot of internal testing and it’s looking fantastic. We’ll move to a closed beta testing round very soon, and after actioning feedback and any required improvements/fixes from this, will be launching an open beta version for everyone to try out.
That’s all for now, join the conversation on Facebook, Slack, or our weekly Teardown Tuesday live stream where we design new open-source Gizmos.
