Apologies for the lack of updates and interaction online this week. It has been a bit insane and just haven’t been able to post while keeping everything else on schedule. Here is a short post and video about what has been happening.

Things are on track for starting the production early April, and should have everything out the door around mid April for the first 300 orders. We are making the final modifications to the mechanism and should have that wrapped up and printing by the end of next week. I’ve got two additional engineers now helping with both mechanical and electrical work, so next week will go pretty quickly.

The production space will be available early April, so we will start getting everyone in one place instead of being spread out around Hong Kong.

Next week should be pretty smooth, I’m looking forward to wrapping up the development.

Some like it hot.

But, I prefer something that is just hot enough. This is the first prototype assembly of how the hot end fits together. This isn't the final design by any means, just an iteration on the way to the final design. We will need to do one more iteration of this to the updated design to start getting first prints.

Getting things ready to ship at the same time as wrapping up the final design is a balancing act that requires a lot of hats, either on different heads or to be worn by the same person.

We’ve got a small team here at Makible, just Nick, Felix, Sarah, and myself, but that is about to change. We are bringing on some more engineers to the team to help get the MakiBox into the market quicker, so these sparse updates will hopefully be a little more frequent soon. This will be good so that we can do a lot of the final work in parallel, and can hit the production as soon as we have the final production PCBs.

It also looks like we might have a new home for out prototyping and production here in Hong Kong. Finding places here usually is a very long process, filled with hoping for lucky breaks. We will be looking at it on Thursday, but a place has come up which may be a great match for us, so that will help speed things up and make the production go more smoothly. Look forward to some pics on Thursday for that.

I’ve still got more work to do for the final integration to get the first prints. Wednesdays are usually a lot more productive for me, so I’ll try to wrap things up tomorrow. I’m looking forward to getting the extra hands on board to speed everything up.

This has been a pretty packed week. The prototype is almost ready to print, now that it has the drive system, including the cable drive, prototyped. I’ll be attempting to get it to printing this weekend. 

We got in PCBs and we found, well, a bit of a snafu. Basically the middle layers had been left out of the exported files, and no one had noticed that it was a four layer design and not a 2 layer design, which is what most of the RepRap related ones are. I’m in the middle of sorting out what this will do to the schedule, but worst case this will take around 4 weeks to get the new production boards back and ready to ship. I’ll confirm the schedule in the next few days.

Our community is growing nicely here, and to facilitate keeping that going, Nils has helped to set up a forum on forum.makibox.com. Thanks Nils!