Mega Ninja Kickstarter Update
Monday, May 14, 2012 at 01:58AM Hey everyone. First up, apologies from all here at Ninja Blocks for going dark over the last few weeks. This whole process has been a whirlwind. No, it’s been a tornado - no, make that tropical cyclone! We feel as if we are getting back in control and can finally answer people’s questions with some confidence. Before we get into the nitty gritty, the question you are all asking...
When will I get my Ninja Block?
Boxed up Ninja's ready to ship
Soon! We said May and we are still aiming to ship most rewards in May. The rest of the update will shed more light on why we aren’t 100% confident.
Note that we have already shipped to the 29 brave souls who stumped up extra to get it early - except for the person whose shipment is stuck in German customs, everyone should have received them by now.
Let us know if you haven’t received yours!
Fun with Manufacturing
;)
Naked sensor boards
The Ninja Block is made up of three parts: a Beagle Bone (an open source embedded Linux computer running Ubuntu), a custom designed Arduino that sits as a daughter board on the Beaglebone and of course....love.
When our first five sample Ninja Capes arrived from our manufacturer, we were super pleased that all five boards worked flawlessly! We immediately gave the go-ahead to get the rest of the Ninja Capes to be manufactured. Unfortunately upon receipt of the boards we found that close to 25% of the boards were faulty.
• 68 boards had faulty temperature sensors. • 18 were dead, or the serial port wouldn’t work. • 37 had electronic faults that caused false sensor readings.
Here’s a pro tip: When outsourcing production to a manufacturer, make sure you have an agreement in place so that you can get faulty parts fixed/replaced. Better yet, pay them to do the testing there before you ship them to Australia! Unfortunately in the rush to get things out the door we failed to do this! Thankfully our manufacturer has agreed to replace the faulty Ninja Capes.
Mods (the hardware patch)
;)
A modded Ninja cape
Each Ninja Cape has three ports for attaching sensors and actuators. For ease of use we use mini-USB ports. Within each of these ports is an analog input line that allows the Ninja Block to tell Ninja Cloud what accessory is plugged in.
The circuit for the Ninja Cape is based on the open source Arduino (a Sparkfun Arduino Pro Mini 5V to be exact). Analog pins on an Arduino will ‘float’ at a random value until they’re attached to a circuit (or driven high or low). This is a bad thing if you’re relying on using the pin to tell you when an accessory is plugged in. On an Arduino you’d normally correct this by driving the pin high or low, which is what we did. This worked for two of our ports but we overlooked how the Arduino Pro Mini multiplexes the analog pin within the third port. For the working capes already delivered, JP (our hardware guru) modded them by adding three through hole resistors to the Ninja Cape. Well, JP modded a couple and Maddy is working through the rest!
It takes at least 6 weeks to get a new/modified design into production. So we (well, Maddy) has sucked it up and we’ve ordered enough of the existing design to fulfill all our Kickstarter and pre-orders. At least this will ensure that almost everyone has the same hardware.
Ninja Cloud
Mark and his team have rebuilt Ninja Cloud from the ground up to deal with the firehose that is real time sensor data. In other words we bit the bullet and ditched the prototype and started from scratch with a message queue based system. We’ve been focussed almost solely on the backend, which is why if you’ve logged into the Ninja Cloud, there isn’t a whole lot to see.
It hasn’t helped that the front-end team (who also double as management) have been flat out with business related endeavors for much of the last month. We are back on the real job and have what we hope will be a great interface well underway. If any of you are, or know, a UX talent who wants to join Ninja Blocks, please point them this way. There’s heaps of challenging design to be done as we figure out how to make connecting devices easy without crippling it.
To summarize - this focus on ‘plumbing’ will provide Ninja Cloud with a firm foundation to connect with 3rd party connected devices and other web services. In the short term we have been doubling down on building out this firm foundation at the expense of building out channels and a better interface.
Webcams
We have been testing a series of webcams so that we can send photos (and eventually video) from the Ninja Block. A bug in the Ubuntu Arm kernel that was causing the most V4L (video for Linux) based webcam apps to intermittently seg fault has been fixed. Which is a huge relief as only a handful of really expensive webcams seemed to work. Now we can fulfil our orders without stressing and most webcams you have lying around your house will probably work with Ninja Blocks!
3D Printing & Laser Cutters
Garh! While 3D printers are fun....manufacturing on them is not. So far we have printed close to 1800 enclosures (including ones for sensors), around 18 kg of ABS so far...and this takes TIME.
Unfortunately our ‘cheap’ laser cutter also took one look at the workload we were putting through it and promptly died as well. Injection moulding is looking like a very sexy option in the future...
Company stuff, Website, Team, Jobs and more...
This post is way long enough already, so here’s the short version of the non-block news. Ninja Blocks was born in Startmate, a mentor driven startup accelerator (think Sydney based YCombinator) and part of that was a big roadshow to investors. Whilst this was distracting, Ninja Blocks got a stack of interest...suffice to say, watch this space. It’s all good. However we do recognize that it has taken some focus off actually delivering.
We finally have a half decent website. We’d love it if you guys posted your questions, ideas, and general ramblings in the forum. We are working on the roadmap right now, so your feedback might just be the thing that gets us to make sure your ideas for your Ninja Blocks are possible sooner rather than later.
As you might expect, the team has expanded. JP, our hardware engineer, has come on board full-time just this week. This is a huge win. JP has over 15 years’ experience with hardware design and has invaluable experience taking products from concept to market. He also speaks 5 languages, including Mandarin and Cantonese, which makes life infinitely smoother for us and our suppliers. Former contractor Clint has also thrown his lot in full-time. He’s started on some channels and has also been getting our dev-ops house in order. Mark and Clint have a couple more people lined up but could certainly use some assistance. If you are unhealthily obsessed with FP and 0MQ, then drop us a line. We (like everyone else) are also looking for a sensational UX person. If you are being driven insane by clients who just want vanilla iPhone apps, we certainly have no shortage of challenges. We are flexible on location too. There are already people in Seattle, San Francisco, opposite corners of Sydney and soon New Zealand.
In bittersweet news, Maddy is well pregnant with her first child. Unfortunately having two founders become first time parents in the first year of a startup isn’t the best idea. So after we’ve finished shipping Kickstarter, Maddy is going to take it a bit easier. You know, get back to running LittleBirdElectronics.com. As it happens, Pete, one of our advisers, was looking to escape from the kids after a couple of years tending primarily to the home front. He’ll be helping Marcus with business stuff and front-end stuff…we’ll call him the late Founder.
Expect us to confirm shipping plans in a few days. If we have to push back, we will definitely have some blocks available for those willing to ride the bleeding edge. More info on that to follow.
The Whole Ninja Blocks Team
