C.H.I.P. (s?!?!?!)

C.h.i.p.sters!!!

We’re back! And we have big news! We’ve taken a {short} rest, payments have been processed and we’re working closely with the BackerKit team to finalize our post-campaign system.

BackerKit’s logo, clearly.

As many of you know, BackerKit allows you to add items to your Kickstarter pledge. Through discussions with our suppliers and manufacturing partners about the demand for C.H.I.P., we’re happy to announce that every backer can now add 1 additional C.H.I.P. to their pledge with no additional shipping charge! Of course, you’ll be able to add PocketC.H.I.P., adapters, and cables as well. Please note, additional shipping charges may apply.

SO WHAT HAPPENS NOW?

Over the next week, you’ll receive an invite to the C.H.I.P. BackerKit. Because there are almost 40,000 of you, we’ll be sending out invitations in groups by reward tier. Everyone will get an invitation. Nothing will sell out. We’ll still ship according to our reward tiers.

NOTE: Any international shipping credit will automatically be applied within BackerKit.

You do not need to set up a login and password to use BackerKit. If you use your Facebook login for Kickstarter, the survey will be sent to the email attached to your Facebook account. Just follow the link to fill out the survey, add any add-ons you want, and you’re good to go.

If you decide to change your add-ons and address, you may do so before our cut-off date, which will be announced later. If your address changes before shipping, don’t worry. We’ll send a final reminder to adjust your address before we ship.

Please get your BackerKit survey filled out and back to us as soon as you can. BackerKit is great.  They’ve been super helpful through this process with us. We’re all in good hands with them. Of course, we will be here as well.  Here we go! Stay tuned!

Thomas from BackerKit, very excited about PocketC.H.I.P.

As always, \(•◡•)/

– Dave, Gus, Thomas, Wynter, Sharps, Vanessa, Alex, George, and Richard (AKA everyone at @nextthingco)

 

 

THANK YOU, BACKERS!!! \(•◡•)/ NEXT THINGS!!!

Amazing C.H.I.P.sters!!!

Typed words can only express so much.  We’d much rather show you how thankful we are for your overwhelming support and encouragement throughout the last month. Over 50,000 C.H.I.P.s! Over 15,000 PocketC.H.I.P.s! And more importantly, almost 40,000 backers! We still can’t believe there are SO MANY C.H.I.P.STERS!! You are really the best! \(•◡•)/ <3

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

First, Kickstarter needs to transfer the campaign pledge funds (which can take up to 2 weeks) so we can start to place those high-volume component orders.  Kickstarter will charge your credit card and collect your pledge. It’s possible that the transaction may be declined due to an expired card, insufficient funds, or safety measures that require you to contact your card provider before payment can be completed. If this is the case, Kickstarter will send an automatic email to alert you.Please keep an eye open for any payment issues via email from Kickstarter.

Second, we have to find out what add-ons and accessories you want and where you want us to ship them. We will be sending our BackerKit survey out to collect this information after Kickstarter pledges have been cleared and transferred.

We will give you a heads up before we send the survey so you can watch for it. It is important that when you receive the survey, you get it back to us as quickly as you can. Our ability to order the right quantities of parts depends on receiving this information from all of you ASAP. Don’t worry — we’ll round up on quantities. 🙂

You do not need to make a login and password to fill out your survey, just fill it out and you’re all good to go!

If you use your Facebook login for your Kickstarter account, the BackerKit invite will be sent to the email you used for your Facebook account. If you have another email you prefer it to be sent to, please email support@backerkit.com.

Remember: You’ll receive an email for a BackerKit survey in approximately two weeks. BackerKit allows you to confirm your reward selection, add on accessories, and update your shipping info.

_____________________________

PRE-ORDERS

We won’t be accepting pre-orders for now —  Finding our early adopters is what the Kickstarter campaign was for! Y’all are our community and we want to make sure you’re taken care of first and foremost.  Preorders will open once we’ve made headway into fulfilling your pledges.  To sign up for preorder announcements and general mailing list goodness, visit nextthing.co. Also, to clear up a little confusion: when preorders do open up, thanks to your support and encouragement right now, C.H.I.P. will still be $9.

DEVELOPMENT

  • Next Things in Hardware: We’re finalizing design revisions for C.H.I.P., PocketC.H.I.P., and the video adapters. As dimensions, pin-outs, and specifications firm up, we will be posting updates on our website and message board. Ultimately, we’ll be releasing source files around the time our Alpha boards are ready and cleared to send to Kernel Hacker backers. It’s a long road of design decisions, testing, certifications, testing, more testing, and testing again. Then trying it out with 1,000 brave kernel-hacking souls, tweaking the hardware design as we learn things from the alpha testers, and doing the testing and certifications all over again. It’s not going to be an easy next 4 months, but with your amazing support behind us, we can’t wait to get started!
  • Next Things in Software: We are preparing Linux to boot right off C.H.I.P.’s solid state memory and starting to get our favorite programs running happily on C.H.I.P. In order to support all of C.H.I.P.’s features, we will be putting a lot of programming work into building and managing drivers. Thankfully, we are not alone in the effort! We are super excited to start working with the experienced code warriors at Free Electrons and the amazing ARM Linux community.

STAY TUNED! 

The PocketC.H.I.P. design video is just a start.  We want the process of bringing C.H.I.P. to you to be as open as possible. Moving forward, we’ll be posting updates and videos along the way so you can watch C.H.I.P. become reality. Follow along on Kickstarter or on twitter (@nextthingco).

Big shout out to the reddit community, alive and active atreddit.com/r/chipcommunity

and our fan site ( \(•◡•)/ ) thechipguys.com.

JUST TO REITERATE… 

WE COULDN’T HAVE DONE IT WITHOUT EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU WONDERFUL CHIPSTERS.

We were all buzzing with excitement for months leading up to the campaign and it’s been awesome to finally share with everyone!  You’ve all been absolutely fantastic.  Thank you for helping us make this possible.  This is an amazing start to a very exciting journey and we’re so excited to have you with us!

\(•◡•)/ – Dave, Gus, Thomas, Wynter, Sharps, Vanessa, Alex, George, and Richard (AKA everyone at @nextthingco)

P.S. – Here are a few of our favorite campaign snapshots!

Portable Fragging with PocketC.H.I.P.!!!

Hey C.H.I.P.sters!

As promised, we made time for some more PocketC.H.I.P. demo action. Over the last few days, we’ve been stress testing the PocketC.H.I.P. prototypes and we’ve finally found the perfect test: PocketC.H.I.P. running QUAKE 3!!!

Quake 3 or more specifically IOQuake3 with the Open Arena content pack is a great way to see the real power of PocketC.H.I.P. and it’s completely free and open source!

Take a look!

Brought to you by: the power of AWESOME open source projects!

Getting IOQuake up and running was amazingly straightforward thanks to these great open source projects:

Tell us your ideas for other PocketC.H.I.P. demos!  What kinds of things do you want to see?

Post your ideas in the update comments or on twitter – @nextthingco

PocketC.H.I.P. LAN Party anyone? 😉

– Dave, Richard, Thomas, Gus, Wynter, Vanessa, Alex, Sharps, and George @nextthingco

Up Close with PocketC.H.I.P.

Howdy Chipsters!

We finally had the chance to show off PocketC.H.I.P. over the last two weeks and seeing people’s reactions has been spectacular.  We’ve been stoked about PocketC.H.I.P. for some time and want to make sure everyone gets to see a demo.  For those that haven’t had an opportunity to see PocketC.H.I.P. in person, we’ve added a PocketC.H.I.P. demo video to our campaign page as well as a behind the scenes look at design process behind PocketC.H.I.P.

Take a look and let us know what you think!

\(•◡•)/ – Dave, Gus, Thomas, Wynter, Sharps, Vanessa, Alex, George, and Richard (AKA everyone at @nextthingco)

30,000 backers!! 40,000 C.H.I.P.s!! \(•◡•)/

30,000 backers!! 40,000 chips!! 

Chipsters, you are amazing! Thank each and every one of you so much for making this campaign what it is. We’ve been really excited about the $9 computer for some time and it feels great to see that it means as much to all of you as it does to us!

We know lots of you still have questions about C.H.I.P., so we’ve added a lot of answers to our FAQ page (the FAQ is at the very bottom of the “Campaign” page). We’re posting a few of the most frequently-asked FAQs in this update as well, just so there’s no missing them. 🙂

Why pledge now? 

We are working very hard to make C.H.I.P. possible, and every pledge on Kickstarter helps us prove that the world wants access to lower cost computing. By backing C.H.I.P.’s Kickstarter campaign, you add your voice to the conversation, and help show that the world wants a $9 computer for everything from education to home automation. Back C.H.I.P. today, and be a part of the early adopters that made it possible!

Will C.H.I.P. be available after the campaign?

Right now, we are entirely focused on the Kickstarter campaign. The only way to be an early adopter of C.H.I.P. is through Kickstarter. We plan to make C.H.I.P. available at a later date, but are committed to fulfilling our Kickstarter backers’ pledges first.

International shipping is (still) too expensive! 

Yes. And we are still very actively looking into it. We’ve been in contact with dozens of specialists: distribution centers, freight forwarders, fulfillment companies and customs brokers. We’re doing our best to find more competitive international rates and are trying to get our shipping costs down. Even though C.H.I.P. is small, there are handling, distribution and shipping costs that can’t be skimped on if we want your package to arrive safely.

Can I buy multiple C.H.I.P.s right now? 

We’ve held off on allowing multiple C.H.I.P. orders from our early production batches in order to make sure that everyone who wants to be an early adopter via Kickstarter is able. Offering Multiple-C.H.I.P. packs would mean that a single manufacturing run reaches fewer people. Don’t worry, we plan to make C.H.I.P. available in larger quantities later.

Can I add extra to my pledge to get more items? 

Unfortunately, no. Kickstarter does not allow us to offer add-ons to rewards, or allow multiple rewards, and with the amazing number of backers C.H.I.P. has, we simply can’t track each pledge + reward individually! Please take a minute to make sure your pledge and reward tier match.

Why composite video? 

Several reasons: Televisions are the most commonly available screen in the world and the vast majority of them have a composite input. Composite video can also be integrated without having to work in licensing fees to the cost of C.H.I.P. Composite is also a very low profile connector, allowing us to keep the footprint of the board small for people wanting to build C.H.I.P. into projects.

Does C.H.I.P have an SD Card slot? 

No. By integrating reliable storage onto the device, we’re able to both save you a “getting started” cost and allow Linux to come preinstalled on C.H.I.P. meaning it’s ready to go when it arrives at your door. One of the big goals of this project is making C.H.I.P. easy to use, and this goes a long way towards that end. If you need additional storage, it’s easy to add an SD card reader over the USB ports on C.H.I.P.

What was that “Chipsters” song in the MakerFaire Video?

It was called Chipsters! By Ultrasyd.  You can find it here!

http://bleepstreet.bandcamp.com/album/chipsters-ep

\(•◡•)/ – Dave, Gus, Thomas, Wynter, Sharps, Vanessa, Alex, George, and Richard (AKA everyone at @nextthingco)

Alex taking calls from regional banana wholesalers who saw our Maker Faire cart.

Gus and his Biltwell helmet, with C.H.I.P. “attachment”