ZOMG We’re shipping!!
over 5 years ago – Tue, Oct 01, 2019 at 11:59:30 PM

Hi folks, awesome news!! We’re starting to ship final rewards today; I just dropped off the first batch of non-beta backer Kickstarter rewards at the post office!

300 of our 2,000 final, production Meadow F7 Micro boards have come in (we should get the rest end of week, or early next week), and we’ve been provisioning and packaging them up for backers!

If you can’t tell by all the exclamation marks; we’re really excited about this. :)

We’re generally shipping in order of backers, so the first 100 backers should expect their rewards to ship this week.

Can’t wait to get Meadow into your hands!

While you wait for your boards, you can get a head start by reading  through the Meadow docs on the beta site @ beta-developer.wildernesslabs.co/Meadow.

Chat soon!

Catch Meadow and Hanselman today @ DotNotConf!
over 5 years ago – Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 09:32:37 PM

Hey folks, real quick update today!

Scott Hanselman showing Meadow tonight!

First up; the venerated Scott Hanselman will be giving a talk today on Meadow @ DotNetConf! It’s going to be webcast, so anyone can join, and it’ll happen at 7:30pm PT (UTC -7). If you’re free, definitely check it out!

Meadow is coming!!

Also, we’re still waiting to receive the first batch of production boards. Our board house ran into issues with part of their production line down because of a flow solder bath failure. We had another issue as well; a bunch of our STM32F7 chips didn’t get repackaged well from the assembler that did our last production test (100 boards). When those chips went through transit, they had a rough journey:

Luckily, we were able to overnight replacements to them, but it was an expensive lesson about repackaging. :D

We still expect to receive the first 200 or so boards this week and start shipping out to our first backers, so watch your mailbox! Meadow is coming!!

Beta 3 Out + Production Hardware Delay
over 5 years ago – Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 12:41:11 AM

Hey folks! Dropping a quick update here today to keep everyone up to date of happenings.

Beta is on the Move!

On the good news front, we shipped Beta 3, folks are playing with it, and it’s awesome! Check this out, this is an SPI display using our graphics library:

It’s been great to get this beta in the hands of more folks who are helping us harden the deployment story, and solidify the basics.

Since the last update, we made some great improvements to various parts of the beta and one of the biggest is our Visual Studio on Windows deployment story; we now have File > New > Meadow App support, and one touch deployment from the “>” button (before you had to use the `DotNet new` command). Check this video out:

Production Board House Delay

On the less than good news front, we had a delay on the assembly of our production boards. We delivered all components and PCBs to our assembler a couple weeks ago, but due to a perfect storm of internal mishaps there, they’re just now getting to them. The resource that was receiving the order and was supposed to move it forward moved on, and it looks like the order fell through the cracks. They’re going to split the order and get us a partial delivery next week, and then finish the rest of the week after. 

Not a huge delay, but we’re definitely excited to start shipping boards to you awesome backers!

So, with any luck, we’ll start shipping final boards by the end of next week (September 27th).

That’s it, stay tuned for more!

Golden Board and Beta 3!
over 5 years ago – Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 03:17:47 AM

Heck’s to the yeah! 

Beta 3 is coming. :)

This is really exciting. We’re working on the last pieces of beta 3 right now. Check out this File > New Meadow App > One Touch Deploy from VS4Mac:

Here’s the rundown of Beta 3 features:

•  USB Deployment & Meadow.CLI - This was a lot of work, and one of the most productive new features. Meadow will no longer need a fancy pogobed and STLink to deploy Meadow + apps to. We’ll be shipping a Meadow Command Line Interface (Meadow.CLI) to enable command-line deployments and device management, as well as first-class support for one-touch deployment in both Visual Studio for Windows and Mac.
•  PWM - There are 15 hardware Pulse-Width-Modulation (PWM) capable pins on the Meadow F7, and we’ve got them all humming! Or modulating, rather. This enables LED dimming, servo + motor control, and more.
•  Protocols: I2C & SPI - I2C and SPI are up! This opens a ton of new Meadow.Foundation peripherals.
•  Analog Fix - Woot! Turns out, after fixing the hardware, the software side of analog conversions just worked. And it’s got all that great reactive IObservable API goodness that we added in Beta 2, too.
•  New Beta Docs Site - We’ve been hard at work on Meadow content for beta 3, and we’ve done a big design revision of the new docs site. You can find it at staging-developer.wildernesslabs.co. This is still a work in progress and we expect to push updates over the next couple weeks. We also have the Meadow and Meadow.Foundation API docs up.

We had to push Network to the next beta. We’ve made some good progress on it, and are in the process of integrating the coprocessor networking capabilities into the Mono/.Net stack (so it’ll just work, natively, as a network device), however, in order to flash any firmware updates to the ESP32 coprocessor (the chip that actually does the WiFi), we need UART support, and that’s coming in the next beta. We get around that on our development boards because we can program the ESP32 via the pogobed. 

Also, Mark, the team member working on the Networking functionality is out on vacation for the next week and a half, so progress there will pause for a moment.

We Have a Golden Board!

We did it! The fix to the analog input circuit worked as planned, and it would appear that we didn’t introduce any new bugs. ;)

This means that we have a golden board design. Before we go to production though, we have at least one board (out of the 100 of these golden Rev.C boards) that doesn’t want to talk to its flash chip correctly. Hopefully it’s just a freak occurrence, but we’re going to test the flash on a bunch more and see if we can figure out what happened on that board. We’re also going to x-ray that board to see if the soldering on the chip is good. It’s a Ball-Grid-Array (BGA) device, which means it has a bunch of tiny little solder balls underneath the chip, as opposed to wire leads around the outside, so a visual inspection is impossible without x-ray. We’re hoping to solve this in the next couple days, and then if all goes well, we’ll put the rest into production next week. We want to make sure that whatever happened with that board doesn’t happen to any other boards.

Schedule

Given our good luck, our schedule is still basically holding up. We’re going to start shipping out the beta boards next Tuesday, after the Monday holiday!

•  September 3rd-ish - Beta 3 boards and hack kits ship! 
•  September 13th - Production boards ready. 
•  September 21st-ish - Start shipping final boards and kits.

We’ve decided not to gate any final rewards shipping on Beta status, so depending on the timing of Beta 4, backers may start receiving kits while we’re still in Beta 3. We’ll know more in a couple weeks.

We’re looking forward to getting this into your hands!

PWM, USB, IDE, I2C, ADC, ZOMG
over 5 years ago – Sat, Aug 03, 2019 at 12:47:55 AM

Exciting, interesting, and oh jeez, updates today. :)

PWM is Online!

Ok, this is awesome. PWM is working on several pins and we have proudly updated all the purely PWM powered peripherals perfectly post-haste in Meadow.Foundation. 💪🏽💪🏽💪🏽

New PWM peripherals now ready for the Beta 3 release:

• PwmLed
• RgbPwmLed
• LedBarGraph
• Servo.Core
• Piezo
• HBridgeMotorController

I2C is in Progress

We have I2C up on the board natively, and we’ve got the managed API penned. But when we call it from managed code, we’re getting an I2C busy error that we’re debugging. Everything looks the same between the two apps, but there is some complicated memory protection stuff on our (more secure) version that may be affecting it. Hopeful we’ll solve early next week.

USB Deployment is a go!

This is amazing. We got USB deployment working! We no longer need an STLink device to deploy Meadow applications over JTAG, we can now use the Meadow Command Line Utility (Meadow.CLI) to deploy apps and runtime assemblies (like MSCorlib) over USB. This means that app deployment turnaround time has gone from “grab a coffee, it’ll be a few minutes to deploy and load over the wire,” to a quick push and your new app is running!

Visual Studio Windows and Mac IDE extensions are drafted.

We now have Meadow extensions for both Visual Studio Windows, and Visual Studio Mac. And thanks to the help of friend of Wilderness Labs’, Mikayla Hutchinson, we have Meadow SDK application templates built into the extensions:

As a bonus; and hat-tip here to Mikayla, these use the new DotNet SDK Template system, so they’re also compatible with `DotNet new`.

ZOMG we borked ADC.

This update is the “oh jeez,” update. Our STM32F7 symbol file in the schematic had two pins swapped related to the Analog Reference Voltage:

Note that in the above image, N1 is connected to VREF+, and should actually be VREF- (Ground). 

This explains the weirdness that we kept seeing in Analog with it only returning high or low, and no intermediate voltages (as we noted in the last update). This whole time we thought it was a software/timer issue that we just hadn’t solved yet.

So this was a bummer, but has actually turned out ok. First, this was the last piece of hardware validation that needed to happen before we put these boards into full production. This means; if our fix is good, and we didn’t bork anything else, these new boards are going forward to production. :) Secondly, we were able to do a very fast design change and get boards quick-turned. The PCBs have already been manufactured, and at this writing, are on their merry way to our quick-turn prototype assembler. 100 boards will be assembled and distributed among the team, and a lucky set of Beta 3 recipients. These 100 boards should be in our hands by Friday the 16th of August.

Finally, this actually may have been a blessing in disguise. We used this mistake to improve the way that the board handled analog references voltages and extended the design in a very slight way to provide the end user (you) with a new feature. Basically, the way that it works with the Feather spec, is that in order to use the Analog input ports, you need to manually provide a reference voltage to the AREF pin. Almost always, this means connecting a wire between the 3V3 rail/pin on the board with the AREF pin. This design allows you to change the reference voltage so that if you’re using a voltage with a strange top end voltage, say 2.2V, then you could create a 2.2V reference voltage (using a Zener diode or similar), and it would give slightly better resolution of those values. However, this is super edge case. 99% of the time, you just need it set to 3.3V.

So what we did, is automatically connected a 0Ω resistor between AREF and the 3.3V rail. If you want to use a custom AREF, simply pop off the 0Ω and then provide your own voltage reference to AREF.

Schedule

Ok, assuming that these new boards are good to go, we now have some visibility into a shipping schedule again. These are roughly the milestones and timeline ahead:

•  August 16th - We pick up 100 prototype boards. These boards will get mailed worldwide to various Wilderness Labs team members.
•  August 23rd - Boards arrive at Mark’s house in the UK.
•  August 30th - Hardware Validation; it will take Mark about a week to run through the full suite of hardware validations. Starting with ADC; so we know right away whether or not we fixed that. Other tests include GPIO, SPI, I2C, Network, Power Management, etc.
•  August 30th-ish - Beta 3 boards and hack kits ship! As soon as these boards are validated, our beta 3 packages (which are already packed and ready to go, sans boards), will get shipped out. 
•  September 13th - Production boards ready. WAT WAT?! Ok, so some really cool news here. We’ve decided to get the production boards (2,000) of them assembled locally here in Portland (actually, Vancouver, Washington; just across the river). It’s going to cost about a buck more per board, but we don’t have to ship everything to Taiwan, pay a 5% component import tax, and then wait for everything to ship back. This will cut our assembly turnaround time (including shipping) down from around a month to under two weeks. Once we get these production boards, we’ll need to validate that they are good to go, which will take a little time.
•  September 21st-ish - Start shipping final boards and kits to all you awesome, patient, lovely people. These will get shipped out in waves, in backer order. We have a ton of boards and kits to ship, and every board will be provisioned before they got out, which is still a manual, time consuming process (in the future, we’ll have a jig that will automatically provision them in 10-up batches at the end of assembly).

Thanks!!

You all have been so awesome during the process, and we are grateful for your patience and trust in us. We are really, really excited to get this into as many hands as possible. Meadow is an IoT game changer, and we’re glad you’re along for the ride!