The End of an Era

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

Kickstarter Update:

Things are coming along well. It’s astounding the number of parts that need to be verified, coordinated, counted, and wrinkles that generally need to be smoothed out to get things shipped, but so far we have been able to sort them all out and keep things moving forwards.

This week was all about confirming that the parts were delivered correctly, and preparing to start packing.

At this point the only part that we do not have at the factory where the kits will ship out from are the hardware bags containing the nuts and bolts. Those are completed and on route to the factory as we speak and should arrive in time.

We put together a video last week with some updates about the progress there so if you haven’t seen that yet you can check it out here:

Ongoing Development:

On the firmware side I am deep in a major re-write of how the calibration process works which is turning out to be tougher than I expected. 

The goal is to eliminate the need to enter approximate dimensions for the frame at the beginning of the calibration process which leads to a lot of issues. Ideally we would like to move towards requiring no user input at all, just hook up the belts and press “calibrate” and the machine will take care of everything automatically. 

It’s coming along well, but it’s turning out to be somewhat more tricky than I initially expected. There aren’t any jucy technical details to share, just lots of “Oh god why is it moving to the left? It shouldn’t be doing that!” Hopefully we’ll have a working version to share in the not too distant future.

Anna is Leaving:

Unfortunately Anna is going to be leaving us to pursue Grad School. We are hoping that she has time to stay involved with the project so this shouldn’t be the last that we hear from her, but in the meantime we want to say a HUGE thank you to her for everything that she did to help get Maslow off the ground. We truly couldn’t have done it without her.

Anna working on her laptop in a pile of Maslow boxes

In the short term I’m going to be figuring it out solo, but I may be enlisting the help of some friends in the not too distant future as needed. We’re in a bit of a transitional moment as a company, we have a lot of exciting ideas about how to keep pushing the world of accessible large format cnc routing forwards short term and long term.

Have a great week everyone!

-Bar and Anna