A Plan To Finish Shipping Everything
WiPhone: Not Dead Yet!
Here's What's Left
- finish setting up wireless firmware updates
- send out phones some more phones to hackers, make sure automatic firmware updates are working well
- receive clear front covers
- make PCBAs for remainder of Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and web pre-sales
- finish the injection mold for the Regular frames
- fix any bugs the hackers have found
- update user manual
- assemble remainder of phones
- ship all phones for regular users
Wireless Firmware Updates
When we originally started the project we thought it was only going to be hackers/electronics tinkerers who bought them. But the survey data shows many people who only want to use theirs as a phone and won't be updating their own firmware. Our original plan was to ship the phones and then fix any firmware issues that come up after people start trying to use them in ways we didn't anticipate, but that doesn't work if people won't be able to update their firmware. So we set up wireless firmware updates. Now you can choose to let the phone automatically update itself if new firmware is available, disable firmware updates, or point the phone to a firmware image hosted on your own server. It's currently working as an alpha release and we will be shipping phones to hackers with it enabled.
New Parts
Shipping Order
We now have enough frames (and almost everything else) to fulfill all of the Kickstarter and Indiegogo orders, as well as web sales. A few of you have been asking about the website sales: We have been shipping based on when the order was received and whether you marked yourself as able to manually update firmware or not. This means that in general Kickstarter backers who can update their own firmware have been getting their phones first, and anyone who needs automatic firmware updates will need to wait until we have more polished firmware.
LoRa Messaging
Something cool we added: now if you have LoRa daughterboards you can send LoRa to LoRa text messages using the same interface as sending a regular text message through the phone, and you can save a LoRa "address" under your contacts.
Right now this only works between 2 WiPhones with LoRa, but nothing is stopping you from using the same message format on another LoRa device if you want to send text messages from your embedded LoRa project to a WiPhone.