Survey lockdown, menu languages, add-ons, scheduling and more...
about 6 years ago
– Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 12:07:32 AM
Dear Backers,
Thanks for your ongoing patience with us as we work towards fulfillment of the Nebra AnyBeam pledges. We know it is really frustrating when a Kickstarter project goes over the "estimated" shipping date - especially when we are unable to provide a new estimate. We are also very frustrated about this, and are working as hard as we can to get them out as soon as possible. We have had over 10 successfully shipped crowdfunding campaigns, mostly on Kickstarter, and we are delighted that this will soon be one of them.
Hopefully this update can provide some useful information for you all, so lets get started...
Survey lockdown on BackerKit
You may have received an email in the last day or so from BackerKit (the company we use to do the surveys / pledge add-ons) saying that your survey will be locked down in 48 hours. Basically, we need to do this in order to "freeze" the quantities for devices and add-ons so that we know we have the right amount to fulfill your pledges. So if you want to change / add anything then you will need to do so in the next day before it locks down.
This will NOT lock down your address - we will lock down addresses approximately 1 to 2 weeks before we are ready to ship. So if you are moving soon or in the future before we ship you will still be able to update your postal address from https://anybeam.backerkit.com to ensure the rewards are shipped correctly.
We will post another update before we lock down the addresses to remind you to update yours if you need to!
Delays
As you are probably already aware, we have had some delays. This has been a number of relatively small issues with packaging, translations, printing and other minutiae like that, collectively adding up to larger delays...something unfortunate but sometimes unavoidable.
For example, the logos on the main AnyBeam device - the Nebra part was supposed to be screen printed in blue, with the AnyBeam part laser etched onto the surface. Unfortunately, during tests for bulk manufacture we experienced issues where the screen printing process was scratching the aluminium casing for the projector and we were not getting the quality we wanted. So for that we have decided to laser-etch the entire logo.
Whilst some of these are only minor issues by themselves - it is the little details like this which make the product what it is, so they are still important to get right. Especially for a relatively expensive product such as AnyBeam.
We hope that all of this work leads to a product that you are proud to own, once we deliver them!
Menu languages
Due to the setup of the firmware and on screen display (OSD), we are restricted to 8 languages on the menu at the moment.
For these languages, we have chosen the following:
- English
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Japanese
- French
- German
- Spanish
- Italian
- Arabic
There is a possibility to add further languages in the future, however having looked into this it will require a hardware update and will add to the production costs and further shipping delays. Due to that we decided it was not-essential at this time.
We do, however, already have ~50 translations of the OSD, which you will be able to see on our AnyBeam GitHub page here - https://github.com/NebraLtd/AnyBeam/tree/master/Languages
If you are multi-lingual and know any other languages that are not already covered there, or are able to help us to translate other things such as packaging, user guides etc, we would be absolutely delighted to hear from you in the comments here or via GitHub issues. The more translations we can get the better!
We hope the above 8 languages gives a good coverage to the people who have backed us here on Kickstarter to start with and will keep you posted on any future upgrades as and when we have fully analysed what is required and how long it will take to implement...which we will not do until after we begin shipping.
GitHub documentation
For those more eagle-eyed backers, you may have already noticed that we have started populating our GitHub page with more documentation. For those of you who haven't, you can take a look at the page here - https://github.com/NebraLtd/AnyBeam
As you can see, we are starting to build out the page with more info about the hardware, software and general documentation. We will be adding more and more information to these pages over the coming weeks and months and will keep adding to it after delivery of the pledges too as it will be one of the main locations of information for the products.
Add-ons
We are happy to announce that we have also, after starting the pledge lock down process, now ordered all of the add-ons required to fulfil the Kickstarter rewards - this includes things such as the power banks, cables, tripods and projector displays.
We should be receiving all of these by mid-February, ready to ship out when the main products have arrived.
Scheduling of shipping etc
We have had various issues leading to delays, as mentioned above. But as we start to get some of those issues resolved we are hoping to have a fairly accurate shipping date shortly.
We don't want to share dates that we then miss and cause further annoyance and frustration with our backers, so for now all we can really say is that we expect the shipping to start in the next few months.
We will be shipping all of the pledges and add-ons from us here in the UK with the exception of the mugs and t-shirts which will be shipped directly from Printful this week!
Once we have a more firm date for the full shipping we will post an update.
Thanks,
The Nebra Team
