Just now I received the first shipment of PCBs from the assembly house. We had all the SMDs populated in the factory but decided to do THT ourselves because most of the larger components have to be soldered in a very specific way to fin into the case. So now there's a crate with 200 assembled RISE control boards behind me and I can't help but feel a bit worried about what's going to happen next. We will need to solder each of these boards to the back of the motor, solder all the connectors, program, test .... 200 times. And this is just the first test run. We have already pre-orders for all of these and more. Some very interesting times are ahead of us. We estimated that each of these boards will take about one hour to fully assemble, test and flash with the release firmware. That means 200 hours just for this small step. Considering the cost of labour here in Estonia this final assembly will be one of the most expensive parts of this product. I'm very glad we spent the time and effort to make this thing so easy to assemble - there are actually no wires to solder anywhere, the only wire is from the battery to the main board and that has a JST connector so it's very hard to make any mistakes in assembly.

We should get the plastic parts back from the factory either today or sometime next week. We will test the fit of all parts and then a test run of 1000 plastic sets will be made for us. All the plastic molding stuff is a first for us and it really seems so much more complex than it should be. We have been working with multiple companies to get the best value for our money and, no, we didn't go with the cheapest ones - we actually used one of the most expensive offers but still there have been numerous problems with the injection molds and the quality of the test pieces. But hopes are high that eventually we'll get what we want and we can ship something that we can be proud of.

We have had this thing up for pre-orders for some time now and we are selling something like 10 each week unless we get featured in some weird web news thing and then things pick up momentum for a while. I personally never expected this thing to sell as fast as it does right now - I have much more hope for RollyCat when we finally get to shipping that.