Our latest iteration CEEs are fully working! There's room for optimization, but our prototypes have charged cellphone batteries, measured light intensity with a photodiode, driven electromagnets, and characterized the voltage/current behavior of a lemon battery.

The out-of-the-oven precision and accuracy of our CEEs has been thoroughly encouraging. We're hard at work on digital post-processing and calibration routines to ensure that what you see on your computer is what's happening in the real world.

The design for the laser-cut case and the list of nuts and bolts is nearing finalization, with steps being taken to ensure that the CEE is ready to go when you open your box and as hackable as possible.

With the short list of optimizations we've assembled, we suspect that our next round of boards, "release candidate 2" boards, will be production-ready. Those of you who ordered bare PCBs can expect to have your reward in-hand by the end of the year. With final tweaks and verification, then manufacturing leadtime, those of you who ordered CEEs will be receiving them very early 2012.

Remember to check our Twitter feed and our development site for up-to-the-minute progress reports. Within the next few days we'll be posting some "action shots" of our prototypes, some sample code for an early API, and some waveforms showing off the potential of the CEE.