Case samples from CamdenBoss!
over 8 years ago – Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 11:01:17 PM

Hi all,

Just a quick update to say that we received the case samples from CamdenBoss today....and they look great!

We have taken some quick and dirty photos to show you what they look like below, however they are now winging their way over to Louis to take high resolution shots of for the website (hence why we have left the protective plastic coating on them - to protect them in transit!):

As you can see there are various knockout sections to allow cables into and out of the cases as you need, and also to allow you to wall mount the case if you need also :-)

Once the photos of these are done and we have stock, we will be launching the cases and solar panels on our website for sale to ship out immediately, so you can have them in advance of your PiJuice HAT arriving.

Thanks,
Aaron and the PiJuice team

CamJam, next reviewer, more pictures.......and shipping info!!
over 8 years ago – Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 01:10:16 AM

Hi all,

A lot of stuff to share with you in this latest update. Apologies in advance for another long update but it's all good stuff so we hope you don't mind!

CamJam

As mentioned in our previous update, we were in Cambridge this weekend just gone for the Cambridge Raspberry Jam - CamJam! There was a fantastic turnout of a few hundred people including Eben Upton and his new baby and a few other faces from the Pi Foundation, Pimoroni, RasPi.TV and many more. There were even a good few PiJuice backers and it was fantastic to show the PiJuice in the flesh to them and see their reactions.

Here are a few pictures from the event:

Next reviewers

As you will know, the first samples have just been reviewed by Alex Eames of RasPi.TV. If you missed the videos he made, you can see them here and here. 

The review samples have now been passed to Tim Richardson and will then be passed over to Michael Horne. Keep an eye on their Twitter accounts and I suspect you will see some info in the coming days on them. We will post an update here also if any new content on PiJuice surfaces.

Remember, if you would like to be an early reviewer / tester you can sign up here - https://goo.gl/forms/DBf6dV7UeEzy4isl1

Packaging Pictures

In previous updates we have shared a selection of images of the PiJuice boards, packaging, batteries, solar panels etc and here are few more of them to show you that Louis has just been editing:

Estimated Shipping Date

A lot of you have been asking for a while for an estimated shipping date for the full batch of PiJuice HAT modules and when they will reach backers. We have been advised this week by Embest that the estimated completion of the 5k unit batch will be between the end of December and middle of January.

Embest will then have to ship these to our fulfillment partner and our fulfillment partner will then have to pack and ship them out so we currently anticipate all rewards being shipped by the middle to end of January!

Please consider this as an "educated guess" or an "informed estimate" of the date. We are pushing Embest every day to improve on the shipping timeline and we honestly hope it can be sooner but we don't want to make any more promises that we can't keep. As things progress we anticipate having an even more accurate date and we will inform you every time we hear any updates from Embest.

On that note....

Finalise your shipping address!

This is it! We’re finally getting ready to ship!

We will be locking down shipping addresses on Sunday 3rd December at midday London time. We will send you a "48 hour" notice of locking down your addresses on Friday 1st December. That means you have around 45 days to update your shipping address in your BackerKit survey. We recommend that all backers check their address for any errors so that there is no delay in receiving your reward.

To review your shipping address, you can return to your survey by clicking the link in your survey email or requesting your survey link under "Lost your survey?" on our BackerKit project page at https://pijuice.backerkit.com

If you haven’t answered your survey after this date, you can still fill it out to get your rewards, but your shipment may be delayed.

As said above we’re currently aiming to ship rewards in January, but it may be sooner or later, which is why we are locking things down at the beginning of December (also as we know you will all be busy around Christmas!). If you need to change your shipping address, please make the changes in your BackerKit survey in the next 45 days.

Thanks as always,
Aaron and the PiJuice team

More pictures, videos, documentation and CamJam
over 8 years ago – Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 12:18:45 AM

Hi backers,

Another update for you with more photos, videos and information :-)

PiJuice Testing Video

In the last update we posted a great unboxing video from Alex Eames which hopefully you have all had a chance to watch. Alex has outdone himself again, with a new video testing various aspects of the PiJuice HAT, Solar Panels and Software. Here it is:

Alex has also written a great post on his website with even more detailed information about the testing procedures etc. and you can read that here.

Michael Horne from the Raspberry Pi Pod blog has also written a post about it too - http://www.recantha.co.uk/blog/?p=17688

More pictures

Here are a few more pictures of the PiJuice charging:

And here is a sneak peak of some of the shots that Louis has taken of the solar panels (on his summer holidays no less!):

Getting started info under development

Now we have got the final samples we are beginning to pull together all the documentation, guides, pictures, pinouts, tutorials, guides, descriptions, technical info and all the other stuff you will all need to turn PiJuice from a good product into a great one.

This will always be an evolving piece of work - as we will constantly be adding to and refining these things, hopefully with the input of a lot of you! But we want to make sure there is a large amount of info before you start receiving them (so you have a little less guesswork than Alex had in his tests!!).

We just wanted to give you an idea here, or where we will be putting all this content:

• There is a "quick start guide" in the package which you can see here. As you can see it's pretty basic but really the PiJuice is quite intuitive and very easy to use. 
• There will also be more technical information going up on the PiJuice GitHub here - https://github.com/PiSupply/PiJuice
• And also a lot of picture guides and tutorials going up on our Maker Zone - https://www.pi-supply.com/make 
• We will likely have the pinouts available at http://pinout.xyz
• We will also have tutorials on Instructables and Hackster.io 

As mentioned above, all of these will be constantly evolving and improving as we go forward. One of the ideas behind the round robin review is getting those people providing feedback and asking questions we haven't thought of so we can improve the documentation even before we ship out the boards.

CamJam this Saturday

If any of you are going to CamJam this Saturday 14th October, we'll see you there :-)

We will have 2 PiJuices and all the solar panels, among other stuff. Come and say hello if you're there... Would be great to show you the PiJuice in person!

Thanks as always,
Aaron and the PiJuice Team

RasPi.TV unboxing video and some high resolution photos!
over 8 years ago – Sat, Oct 07, 2017 at 11:47:23 PM

Hi all,

Another update for you, with some more video and photo content and an update about PiJuice Cases and Maker Kits! Let's get started...

Unboxing Video!

One of the first people to receive one of the first PiJuice samples is Alex Eames from RasPi.TV - he wll soon be doing a video looking at the PiJuice working and some of the functionality, but has also done a little unboxing video to get things going:

Once the next video is done, we will post another update. You can also find the post on the RasPi.TV website here with more details.

Michael Horne, from the Raspberry Pi Pod blog and one of the organisers of CamJam, has also posted about this here. Michael is actually one of the first reviewers on the list to get the sample after Alex from RasPi.TV so there will be more from him in the coming weeks so keep your eyes peeled :-)

High resolution photos

As we said in the previous updates, we sent one of the samples to our graphic designer (and all round media guru) Louis - so he could take some high resolution shots of the HAT. We have got absolutely loads, but here is a selection of a few:

We will have more high resolution pictures of the full packaging, accessories, and solar panels to share with you soon. As I am sure you can imagine, it takes a fair bit of time to shoot and edit these photos :-)

A few minor issues with the boards

On further inspection of the boards, we found that Embest had made the following errors:

• A capacitor, C34, on the bottom of the board was missing. This helps with the charge circuitry and whilst it is not essential it is better for it to be there so we have made sure this will be fixed in the full production run.
• The DIP switch on the base of the board was in the wrong orientation, meaning that it would have had the wrong charge profile assigned to it for the BP7X and would not charge optimally. We have asked that they make sure all of the production boards have the correct orientation.
• The screw terminal battery connector for external batteries is facing the wrong way - the ports should be facing into the board. Again, they will fix this with the final versions.
• The stickers were a bit of a weird colour
• They were missing the battery isolation tab

Whilst these are annoying little issues that should have been correct the first time (as they were all correct in our manufacturing specification) this is the exact reason we do these samples so it is good they were found before the full run - as that would have been a lot of extra work for Embest and more delays. There are no major functional or cosmetic issues with the boards so that is a fantastic thing!

We are hoping to hear about a ship date soon from Embest, we will let you know once we hear back.

PiJuice Cases

We have had many many requests from people to design a case specifically for PiJuice that has the ability to have a removable lid to make replacement / removal / installation of the battery super simple, without having to remove the entire case.

We tasked our friends at CamdenBoss (they designed the battery surround for PiJuice as well as our cases for JustBoom, Pi PoE, PaPirus and Flick so we know they are great!) with this very thing and they have sent us back the designs just this week:

As you will see from the above photos, there are two versions of the case - a short one an a tall one. The short one is designed to fit the Raspberry Pi and PiJuice with only a little bit of extra space inside. The tall one is designed to fit the Raspberry Pi, PiJuice and another add on board on top...we based the design on stacking the Pi PoE board we make on top...it is a very tall HAT so it should mean that most other HATs will fit :-)

As you can see from the pictures, both cases have a slide-out lid to enable easy access to the battery without too much fiddling. You can't see them in these pictures but both cases also have "knock-out" parts enabling you to easily have cables entering and exiting the case. Last but not least, the final production versions of the case will come with a set of rubber feet and also will have the PiJuice logo screen printed on the top of the slide in battery cover.

We hope you like them, and we will post more pictures soon - as soon as we have the physical samples from CamdenBoss which should be in the next week or so we hope.

Maker Kits

A number of people have been asking for further information on the status of the Maker Kits. There are about 150 of you who have pledged to receive Maker Kits so we want to make sure you are kept in the loop. In many ways, this is the last aspect of the project still to be completed (of course, barring the shipping of the HATs to you all!)

You may remember that this project initially had the involvement of Harry Gee from Agilic Ltd, and he was contracted to deliver the design side of the project whereas we were initially working on all the other aspects apart from that. As we stated in an update last year, we parted ways amicably in around April last year leaving Pi Supply to deliver the project going forward. 

The only aspect of the project that was left to be completed by Harry Gee / Agilic was the Maker Kits. These were supposed to be completed last year, not too long after the agreement we had signed with Harry. However due to a variety of reasons and disputes on both sides this has not yet occurred, which is disappointing. 

The last thing we heard about them is that they are ready and working well, but just need to be made "production ready"...so it seemed like we were pretty close. We are working with Harry as we speak to identify the outstanding issues and to try and bring the Maker Kits to completion. Hopefully we can do this relatively quickly and get things closed off once and for all. In case money was the issue, we have even offered to pay for the material and labour costs to complete this work so as to expedite their completion. We have also offered our operational / labour resources to assist this in any way possible.

Please rest assured though, that we will be delivering the Maker Kits. If the worst comes to the worst we will just have to develop them from scratch ourselves again...hopefully this will not be necessary but it is an option should our current conversations prove fruitless.

Please note, that this will not delay the shipping of the HATs to any backers - whether or not you pledged for a Maker Kit as part of your reward.

More information and updates on the Maker Kits as we have them :-)

Thanks for reading,
Aaron and the PiJuice team

Slight delay in transit - but we now have the samples!
over 8 years ago – Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 10:57:02 PM

Hi all,

There was a slight delay, due to FedEx, in the transit of these and clearance through customs...however we now have them! We will begin shipping out to our photographer, and to reviewers from the round robin too. If you did not yet sign up yet and want to do it then please sign up here - https://goo.gl/forms/hJIVbkuUq0u2qEYG2

Update video

See below also an update video:

Shipping news

Unfortunately we do not have a shipping date yet, however what I can tell you is that we have been spending a lot of time working out the logistics of shipping the rewards out so that we can get them to you in the most cost effective, safest, and quickest way. What we have landed on is using a Chinese based fulfillment company. We are currently talking to a few but we have a good idea now of who we want to use and the pricing so we are pretty much ready on that front. These companies typically have a lot more employees than we do, and they do fulfillment for a living so it should mean that the vast majority of you will get your rewards far quicker than if we brought them to the UK first and then tried to fulfill all the rewards ourselves...so it seems like a win win all round :-)

The great news is, that we will now be upgrading all of your shipments to a "tracked and signed" service for no extra cost to you. We can do this as we no longer have the extra cost of shipping from China to UK and then out to you...we can just do a single shipment to you from China. It is still going to be a "mail" service, rather than a courier service (so it will still take around 10 days to most locations rather than 2 or 3 days with a courier) but at least you will be able to know when it has shipped and track it all the way to your letterbox!

Thanks,
Aaron and the PiJuice Team.