Oh yah, it's time for some holiday bling on the website. And btw, it'll turn itself off automatically after the 1st :)
Wow, things have been busy. An update has long been overdue:
First off, welcome to SparkFun, our new distributor! They’ve done a fantastic job with their entry for Logic (check out the great photography!) and it’s great to have these guys on board. I’m thinking that they’ll be the only US distributor, at least for a while.
I finally got my first shipment of assembled and tested PCBs in from China. Very cool. I also developed some cool automated functional test software that I use here as well as in China.
Since our volumes are up we’re now using a machine shop near here called American Prototype. The heroes over there have done a great job cranking out some really nice Logic cases. I even have some samples of nice red ones. Eventually I would like to offer some different colors.
The other day this guy comes to the door and asks if I have a forklift. Let me tell you there’s something very cool about getting asked that, like you’ve hit a certain milestone. Of course I don’t have a forklift or a loading dock or anything but since this was just a big shipment of Case Logic cases it wasn’t a big deal. Now I have a stack of cases in my cube that’s nearly as tall as me.
USPS has been a bit of a pain lately, losing some packages overseas, or just the other day taking about 4 days for a domestic overnight shipment, which the customer wasn’t too happy about. I was a bit annoyed that I was taking the heat for USPS’s screw-up. I think I’ll switch to UPS overnight and pass the cost along. As far as international goes USPS is something like 3-4 times less expensive than the -- I can only assume much more reliable -- FedEx/UPS/DHL – and for the immediate future I’m willing to re-ship some packages in order to pass along that good price to my customers. However the real solution is to get fulfillment in the EU, which besides Australia is the destination of most overseas Logic units. I’ve got some books on the way from Amazon so I can try and come up to speed on exactly how it’ll work tax-wise, etc.
Speaking of fulfillment in the EU, I also intend to get that going in the US. The last month has seen me go from running the store with 50% of my time to running it with 95% my time which is not sustainable or particularly fun. I love putting labels on boxes and taping them, don’t get me wrong, but that actually isn’t what takes very much time.
The other thing we’ll be doing is getting more and more assembly done externally. With our current volumes it would have made more sense to go directly to a turn-key manufacturer but as it is right now we have a small number of different ones, none of which is ultimately responsible for the end product (that would be me). That said, now that I’ve got boards coming in already assembled and tested things will be a lot easier. The only other non-trivial step is the assembly of the case, which I’m on working on outsourcing. It’s tough when it’s your baby and you’re concerned about quality and defect rate, etc, but it simply must be done.
I’ve been working on getting a new manufacturer ramped up with the wire harness and that’s all under control now but we’re going to be out of stock for about 3 weeks, which is really too bad but there’s not a lot I can do about it short term. The good news is that after the first massive shipment gets in we pretty much will be set, and be able to fill a massive number of orders without skipping a beat.
We’re doing some fun magazine ads these days and I think they’ll just get better. Definitely write in if you have some ideas for an ad you think might really resonate with people.
I’ve added an FAQ for Logic and also updated the Press page. Check it out to see some cool blogs that have written about Logic!
I’m looking to hire a software person to jumpstart the Logic software efforts which have been taking a back seat to running the store lately. It’ll be my first employee, first experience with payroll and with a real accountant so it should be pretty fun.
About porting Logic to Mac/Linux: This will be an interesting challenge. Logic runs on .NET 3.5, which is a fantastic environment, but Mono doesn’t and isn’t going to offer .NET 3.5 support (certainly not Wpf), and WINE, so far as I can tell, just isn’t going to let you install .NET 3.5. So right now the plan is to port Logic (including the windows version) to .NET 2.0. This will be a considerable effort, but worth it if we can keep essentially the same codebase across the platforms. Another option would be C++ and GDK although I’d very much prefer to steer clear of that if at all possible.
All for now! Thanks to everyone who’s been sending in suggestions, it’s been great stuff. Things are going slow with the software updates but everything getting logged and we’ll get to it, not to worry.
Hurray, finally I had enough time to hammer out 1-Wire. It's not as buttoned up as it could be, but it's still much much better than trying to decode it by hand. I didn't know anything about 1-Wire a few days ago, and I have to say it's kindof cool!
Here's what else is coming down the wire, besides putting out the fires.
1. New google adwords image ad, Logic stickers, and Logic FAQ
2. Top secret project, part 1
3. Linux & Mac drivers working + SDK
4. Good support for VMWare + Parallels
5. Top secret project, part 2
6. Website overhaul
7. Get Logic accessories on the site (clips, wires, cases, etc)
8. New video
9. Distribution & Accounting overhaul
10. CAN support
11. More Logic software features
Back to it!
I’ve just spent the last 5 days or so getting Logic ready for 64-bit Vista prime time. Here’s the deal: First of all Vista 64-bit needs a 64-bit driver. 2nd, that driver MUST be signed. In all prior versions of Windows, as well as 32-bit Vista, driver signing isn’t a requirement.
Signing, by the way is somewhat similar to what you go through to get an SSL certificate for your website. A Certificate Authority who is authorized to do MS driver signing makes sure your background is at least somewhat credible and then gives you a bunch of numbers – in exchange for a hefty pile of cash. Verisign, for example, wants $500.
Anyway I had been using Cypress’s handy driver (Cypress makes the USB chip in Logic) along with their .NET API for that (which is actually much messier to use than you might hope). Unfortunately that driver is neither 64-bit compliant or signed by Cypress. I checked into it and Cypress does apparently have a 64-bit driver in the works which they kindly shared with me, however it’s not signed and it wasn’t at all clear that the API I was using would work with it anyways. So I decided to go over to WinUSB.
WinUSB is a generic USB driver provided kindly by Microsoft that will work in XP and Vista and of course 64-bit Vista. It is signed out of the box. Anyway the API for it is very Win32-like and was a bit of an interesting code project. Especially after I got it working in 32-bit windows only to find that the same code utterly refused to work on 64-bit, due entirely, it turns out, to a large number of bad 32-bit-world assumptions in a lot of the .NET interop stuff I wrote. Anyway it went fairly well all-in-all and it was great practice for the Linux and OSX SDKs I’ll be putting together shortly.
One more thing about the signing: generally you need to have your driver’s ini file point to a .cab file which includes the hashes and signatures for all the drivers and the ini file itself – thus ensuring that the entire package hasn’t been altered since it was signed by the publisher. Of course I’m writing my own ini file so I was scared at first that I still hadn’t managed to get around the driver signing issue on 64-bit Vista – but luckily for me 64-bit Vista seems okay installing the drivers with the just embedded signatures – however it does unfortunately still pop up the unsigned driver install warning box. Eventually I’d love to be releasing signed code…
Oh, here’s a picture of my new Mac Mini OSX / 64-bit Vista development computer. Very cool! This purchase is the ONLY splurge over here I should mention, the cash flow situation is still very tight.
Some more random pictures --
Well, we’ve been backordered since August 21st. Despite that disappointing fact I am happy to announce that on Monday, everyone’s back orders are shipping out. I have all the parts in and everything’s ready to go.
So what happened? In hindsight, I should have made a few different decisions, and I think probably the biggest issue was my lack of thinking more than one step ahead – i.e. focusing on the immediate issues at the expense of the longer term ones. Lesson learned!
Sadly, we’re not out of the woods yet. Orders didn’t fall off after the backorder started -- which I expected – in fact they grew instead and the result is that the majority of the new inventory is shipping out to cover the back orders and another somewhat briefer backorder period is probably going to start. If you get your orders in over the next few days they’ll go out early this week, but after that there will probably be a backorder for a week or two.
One takeaway from all this is that I’m becoming much more bullish on this product and am willing to place much larger orders. I’ve had RFQs out all week and a bunch of attractive quotes have come in. Of course this is a longer term solution, so I still am quite frustrated about the current situation. But I believe Logic is an awesome product and I’m going to do the best I can to do a great job with it despite these stumbling blocks. Thank you to all the heroes who are patiently waiting on their Logics – the wait sucks but I think you’ll really like the product when you get it. Maybe like it enough to forget about how long it took to get =)
Some takeaways--
- Take growth into account when predicting future inventory levels
- Assume suppliers will be late and plan this in
- Start outsourcing things you did yourself at the beginning as soon as possible
- Use local manufacturing for small runs.
- Go though larger-qty quoting process earlier in the game.
- Sanity check the inventory status more often.
Things are going well for Logic! Thank you to all the heroes who have sent in suggestions as well as everyone who’s buying Logic! Good times.
In case you’re wondering, we are definitely working on a whole host of different software enhancements. It’s going a little slow but rest assured they are coming. I’m really looking forward to the upcoming enhancements, as well as the upcoming releases of some cool SDKs. Thanks for your patience – I think it’ll be worth the wait.
Inventory is holding up fairly well despite increasing demand. There’s a good chance that we’ll run out of stock temporarily in about a week or so, before the next shipment of Logic aluminum cases gets in. Hopefully that won’t happen, and I’ve got a much better inventory system in place so the likelihood of running out of stock going forward should drop dramatically.
You may have seen all the ads in Circuit Cellar, Nuts & Volts, and Servo magazine. I’m going to change up our magazine advertising strategy and it should be pretty cool, so look for that in Circuit Cellar’s September issue. Also if you’ve seen the ads you’ll notice that they say you can get logic from our buddies at SparkFun Electronics – however unfortunately due to stronger-than-expected demand we’ve been unable to ship them an allotment of Logics. They should have stock at the beginning of September. I’m really excited to have them on board, and looking forward to getting Logic on their site.
All for now – on to the pictures!
Joe
Lots of international orders! It's been pretty cool to get orders from all sorts of interesting places.
Logics, before being laser etched.
Inventory, sweet inventory.
Shipping central! Despite appearances, Logic doesn't actually come with skittles. I’ll talk about what those are for later. Frankly, I’d like to include skittles, but I’m hesitant to ship internationally with any sort of food. And I can’t have all the US people talking about how much they love their skittles while all the international people feel left out… Anyway, I’ll look into it more.
Hooray!!
A couple pretty neat features this time around --
So as you may know, Logic supports sessions -- which allow you to save and restore every last detail of your sessions -- and even send them to colleges over email (they are compressed) -- but as of 1.0.15 you can have a bunch of Logic windows open at once, so you can easily compare. By the way, in case you didn't know, you can just drag your session files into the Logic software instead of choosing Options->Load Session. You can also double click the session files and they will open in a new window.
Second I've added an interesting feature where you can marquee-select a part of the window you want to take screenshot of. Thanks to Dirk in Australia for both of these suggestions.
Also, I need to thank the following heroes for suggesting things that have been or will be added:
-- Jason in CA
-- Mark in AZ
-- Chip in IL
-- Mike in PA
-- Dirk in Australia
-- John in MD
-- Mark in Australia
-- Richard in TX
Thanks!!
Tonight I re-tooled the application so that it's much more SDK friendly. I'm not exactly sure when yet but I'm thinking of releasing it so people can make their own analyzers. It's pretty powerful, you have total access to the data and can draw whatever you like to the screen. It uses a plugin architecture -- you implement a Class Library that implements the IAnalyzer interface. I'd provide the SerialAnalyzer project as a template to start from.
A quick word on my inventory woes. (and, indirectly the woes of all the heroes that want their Logic NOW, damit). It all started with the wire bundles for Logic. I originally got them from E-Z Hook, for an amazingly high price (over 30$ each). So once it looked like Logic was going to pick up I ordered up a batch of cables to be made from my cable assembler (same exact quality, btw) – so that was all well and good until I got the bundles – which were flawless except that for some inexplicable reason they wouldn’t plug into the E-Z Hook XKM probes. Turns out these probes have a pin on them that’s kind of weird and blunt and otherwise non standard. So I have to order new parts, test them out myself, send the kit back to the assembler for rework, then all the way back to me, etc, and so that’s one reason why we’ve been backordered.
Another reason is that digi-key (both digi-key and mouser are both something like 4-5 day UPS ground days away from me, which sucks!) sends me this order early last week, and they accidently replace the crystals with some weird capacitor. Ok, that’s cool right, I call them up and they send me out the replacement parts 2nd day air which were supposed to arrive this last Thursday – when I was going to ship out a BUNCH of Logic units – except they send them – randomly – to some really old address of mine where I don’t know the people there and its on the other side of the bay, etc – so there that went… So unless I want to drive over there a few times knocking on the door hoping someone is home there’s no fast way to recover them.
Then I order -- from mouser a bunch of the same crystals and some other stuff via 2nd day air (overnight costs $50+) – and despite what is says on their site they don’t ship them until Friday! (meaning a Tuesday delivery) and I had JUST sent out emails apologizing for the delay and that they would be shipping out Monday, which now they wouldn’t be.
And we’re still not out of the woods because I’m now out of the original cable bundle order and it’ll be at least another week before I get another (this time pretty large) batch of those in. At least on Tuesday I’ll be able to ship all but one of my backorders.
I’m am SO looking forward to having these things in stock so
I can ship them out to people the same or next day!! Luckily for me Logic customers (aka the heroes)
are pretty cool people and seem to be taking it in stride.
Update: Thanks to my friend Theresa I was able to get a hold of the people at my old place and get the parts that were delivered there! Which means at least some Logics are going out Monday, hooray!
