Hey everyone!
Just thought you guys might like to know we’re in the process of two things:
1.) I’ve successfully found the factory that makes the hobbyking metal gear servos, got samples, tested them, and have negotiated a pretty decent rate for them to make our own servos!
We’re still trying to figure out how to offer an upgrade path for existing users, and how to sell kits going forward. If you haven’t noticed, we’ve stopped selling all colors but blue. This lets us mass-manufacture at a factory now without having to worry about keeping wacky inventory numbers of 7 different colors. Blue was accounting for ~40% of sales anyway, and we haven’t noticed a dip in sales since we stopped selling anyway.
Our current thought is to offer a discounted packs to existing hexy owners, and then to offer both plastic and metal gear kits. (metal gear being $300 vs $250 plastic). If it turns out we’re selling metal gear as much as we sell plastic gears or more, we’ll just switch entirely to metal gear.
We’ll let you know when we start getting shipments in - I’m sure more than a few people would be interested.
Now the bonus: We are also getting some factory samples made of special ‘servos’ made. These are less servos than fancy gear boxes with built-in pots already attached, as we’re ripping the controller board out. Each one would have 5 wires coming out (two for motor, 3 for the potentiometer). The idea is that control would be way better (and servos cheaper) if control was off-boarded to one or more processors on a central board. While it makes for a more complicated central control board, this would be awesome because it would make each ‘servo’ programmable and let you start doing fancy stuff, like position readings (poses anyone?) or even footfall detection. With raw pot data and motor control, the sky’s the limit.