Hi All!

Apologies for the radio silence. Here's a window into what's new in Nonolith Labs.

Our alpha PCBs are in, and they look great. If you missed the twitter post , check it out.

We have a prototype half-assembled, with the parts on hand to build everything. Taking babysteps to help with debugging.

In other news, we have an order for 350u of the ATXMEGA32A4U in the books! Early on, we elected to switch from the LPC1343 to the XMega32A4U. The switch allowed us to majorly crank up the speed of our CEE and produce a more svelte product with fewer hacks. The XMega is a brand new part, but we got enough samples to know that they existed and met most of our expectations. We were wary of supply-chain issues, as Atmel's had some problems in the past, but our rep assured us that the problems had been resolved. At the time of our last post, he had lead us to believe that the chips would be available within "a few weeks." We took it for granted, and kept along with our development process and put our nose to the grindstone with business matters.

After the chips didn't show up online, we got antsy and got back in touch with our rep. Things didn't look good, and we spent some time exploring other options. Turns out, nothing out there can match this chip when it comes to USB throughput or ADC quality. We now have an order on the books, with a twelve week leadtime. Not quite "a few weeks," but we'll take it.

The bad news - between the twelve weeks for the chips and the five weeks for manufacturing, we're looking at shipping in about four and a half months. Our design is on track to be production-ready in well under the quoted leadtime and our supplier suspects that the leadtime can be expedited. We have high hopes for shipping sooner, but we've learned the value of caution. Those of you who ordered boards are in luck - we'll be shipping those as soon as our design is finished and verified.

On a related note, Kevin's constructed a USB stack allowing these awesome chips to talk to a PC.

Now that USB is up-and-running, we'll be implementing the firmware over the next few weeks.

As we move forward, please keep an eye on our issue tracker and status feed. We'll be posting more frequently to Kickstarter, highlighting milestones as our development progresses.

Thanks for your patience!

Ian & Kevin