Abundance, New Firmware, Still Working on Shipping
Happy Wednesday everyone,
This week our shipment which has been making its way through the port at Long Beach finally started shipping out and we got our first batch of tracking numbers for those. It seems that we did in fact make it through before the new tariffs took effect and no one in the US will have to pay duties on arrival which is great news. We expect that all of those orders will have tracking numbers by the end of this week so keep an eye out for those.
I also asked for an update on the status of the orders making their way to the EU. Those orders are still on their way, but they haven’t reached the EU yet. We will keep you posted as soon as we have more information on where those are. I am actively keeping an eye on them.
We have temporarily stopped taking new orders until we can get a handle on the US tariffs situation. Our plan is to open a second warehouse in China to serve kits and replacement parts to everywhere outside the US. That should protect the rest of the world from being impacted by trade issues with the US going forward. For US customers we are working to make sure that everything ships from within the US, again so you shouldn’t be impacted by day to day changes in the rules. We are hoping to have that system set up in the next few weeks for replacement parts and hopefully for full orders in the next few months.
New Firmware Version:
We’ve been quietly working on continuing to improve the firmware. At the moment the big focus is on background improvements and paying off technical debt to make the code cleaner and easier to maintain. The result is that we have a new firmware version ready to release, but you won’t see many changes in it from the outside. You can always find the latest version here.
On the inside it DOUBLES the amount of memory that we have available to the firmware allowing for a lot more space for future improvements. It also adds a new state machine to keep better track of what is happening during the calibration process making future improvements like storing the belt lengths between power cycles so that the machine is quicker to set up and take down.
Unfortunately because of the big changes to how memory is allocated on the ESP32 we can’t update in the normal way (over wifi) and we have to use a USB cable. Here is a video walking through that process:
Needing a USB cable is a one time thing, after you’ve made the jump to v1.0+ you can do regular over the air firmware updates.
Since there aren’t really any big performance upgrades in this update feel free to sit this one out if you want to wait for all the kinks to get ironed out, but if you do decide to update we would love to hear feedback in the forums.
Abundance (A new CAD/CAM option):
We have also been working on a new option for creating and sharing Maslow projects. The challenge of learning CAD/CAM can be a major hurdle.
Most of the existing CAD/CAM solutions are targeted to a different audience than Malsow which can result in them having too many features and or not the features that we want. This results in a lot of existing solutions being expensive and difficult to learn.
In particular there isn’t an easy way to share and collaborate on projects.
To attempt to address that issue we’ve created Abundance which is a new free and open CAD/CAM option. It is still VERY much a work in progress, but the fastest way to improve it is with community input so we would love your feedback.
Here is a quick introduction video:
You can give it a try here: https://abundance.maslowcnc.com/
Thanks for reading and have a great week everyone!
-Bar
