A lot has happened since our Kickstarter campaign closed. We shipped our smaller rewards (design files & PCBs) on time, and are on track to ship all of The Public Radios on time as well. A lot has been happening on the engineering side, and we wanted to give a quick update.
Because of the number of units we're making, we knew we needed to make some design changes in order to reduce assembly time. On the electrical side, we've totally rebuilt our circuit and added a few big features, including a digitally tuned FM IC (the Si4702) and an ATtiny25 microprocessor. Going this route will make it significantly easier to tune your radios, which (surprise, surprise) go to a *lot* of different frequencies. As always, the full source code is open & available on our GitHub repository, here.
On the hardware side, we've put a lot of time into the nitty-gritty of how these will be assembled. We've re-thought a few details of our the design, which is now a bit cleaner looking *and* should be much easier to put together. Which is *really* important for when we need to train people to help us.
Zach also spent some time digging through all of your station IDs and frequencies, and is working on an algorithm that'll help us error-check to make sure nobody gets a radio tuned to the wrong frequency. The result is pretty interesting - check out his initial analysis here.
We've also been going through a *ton* of procurement and planning for our smaller parts. In the next few weeks we'll have finalized purchase orders out for our custom knobs and speakers, with more parts coming soon.
So: It's going well. If you know anyone who wants to pre-order a Public Radio but missed the Kickstarter, tell them to head to our store!
More news soon!
