During last week we validated our final mechanical design and planned an assembly line to build 3 prototypes but we made some critical mistakes.
We spent way too much time pre planning things, made some last minute design changes and then we couldn’t even build one prototype in 5 hours. Screws didn’t fit properly, laser cutter issues, switches didn’t line up with the PCBs… a complete mess. Our plan for the afternoon was to test the ergonomics with a few people but we couldn’t do it because we weren’t even able to build a fully functional prototype.
Learning from the mistakes, instead of building the 50 prototypes in an assembly line we are going to be building prototypes one by one. When we prove ourselves that we understand the whole assembly process and the error rate is close to 0% we will start doing batches of 5. This may seem slow, but making a mistake and redoing a prototype is much more time costly and by doing small batches we can do small improvements and we learn more too.
This is the last version V5. It looks like the ones we’ve been building over a week but it has many small improvements that make it more robust and easier to adjust.
The PCBs arrived yesterday (they work!) but the switches are still on their way. They are due to arrive in two days. As soon as the switches arrive we will start building prototypes and shipping them. In the meantime we will be building the ????
Web update
We’ve removed the outdated front page section of the web and added a team one. Even though I started the project alone, both Matt and Manel have been critical for Shortcut’s development! They deserve all the credit and from now on you’ll hear more about them both.
From left to right: Matt, Luis and Manel
We’ve also added a home bar with “Community” and “Configurator” tabs. Community will be the private forum for the closed beta and the Configurator is the software needed to customize the firmware. Soon we’ll have videos, documentation and a brand new forum!
Next steps:
Plain and simple: build the V5 prototypes and ship them ASAP!