Contextual

Hey backers,

Most of our manufacturers are shut down due to the Wuhan virus. Around 25% of global manufacturing occurs in China so you can guess the consequences on the supply chain.

This bottleneck is quite unfortunate. That being said, we’ve been able to do significant progress on the design of the earbuds and its performance. 

In the December update, we showed you earbuds’ top shell variations. They provided decent performances but were either too bulky or looked boring. We made more variations so they provide strong performance while maintaining a great look.

We’ve made a cool animation showing the evolution, check it out: https://youtu.be/k7_INpSzDA0

Quick notes of each iteration:

1. Base model
   1. The original antenna fitted well there but was underperforming. We changed it to a bigger one, therefore, changing the form factor was required.

1. Antenna only
   1. We needed to make sure the antenna was working well under x amount of plastic thickness. Being extruded so much was technically the best way to measure the performance.
2. Curved extrusion
   1. We wanted to provide a pretty good antenna performance while having a design that was acceptable. But it’s still a pretty noticeable extrusion.
3. All around extrusion
   1. Instead of doing a partial extrusion which violated all design principles, we opted to do a full extrusion. Since the earbud is pretty darn small, it would not be seen. Unfortunately, this additional 2-3mm turns out to be inconvenient in the ear for a bunch of people.
4. Modulated extrusion
   1. In the spirit of keeping design principles mostly intact and still getting awesome performance, we extruded the whole earbud to the antenna height’s requirements, then decreased the other edges so it would look quite similar to the base model. Results: It’s actually the best performance we ever had.

In addition, there were quite a lot of issues getting the mic to work properly. With hundreds of pages of documentation, it was not easy to pinpoint the exact problem. I was frankly scared we would have to drop this nice feature. Fortunately, we found the problem and resolve it, everyone gets the mic 🙂

Essentially, we could start the whole production process right now but as the context goes we simply can’t. We are optimizing the tuning and the firmware so we should encounter fewer problems when the supply chain is restored.

If the situation is too slow to resolve, we are looking to 3D print a number of earbuds and send them to backers to demonstrate our goodwill. We’ll keep you informed.

Take care guys!

Chris and Sylvain