I know you all are very excited to receive your Konnected Alarm Panel kits and are anxious to find out when they're going to ship. In my last production update I told you that we'd be receiving the first batch of 500 orders in mid-February, with the remaining orders to follow a few weeks after. Well, it is now mid-February and I regret to inform you that I still don't have the first batch of 500, and last Friday I just learned of some new delays. 😞

I know this sucks. It's really painful for me to write this, but you all deserve full transparency and the honest truth.

As many of you know, I've partnered with Macrofab for production and assembly of the product and also to help with fulfillment from their facility in Houston. Since the very earliest prototypes, Macrofab has been helping me with sourcing the PCBs and components from Taiwan and China, assembling & soldering the boards and performing quality control checks.

As soon as the Kickstarter campaign ended and I received the funds from your Kickstarter pledges in early January, I signed an agreement with Macrofab to produce 3500 kits (about double the quantity that we pre-sold in the Kickstarter) and additionally help out with procurement of product materials, packing, and shipping the kits to you. Sitting on a pile of cash from your Kickstarter pledges, I also pre-paid 80% up-front to make sure that there were no delays in ordering parts & components so that we could get started with production right away.

Unfortunately, a series of logistical errors and internal communication breakdown has resulted in the failure of Macrofab to have ordered some of the necessary components and materials on time to meet our agreed-upon timelines. Now, due to some orders from Taiwan & China that were placed excruciatingly late, the bulk of those 3500 kits are delayed even further due to the Chinese New Year holiday.

Unnamed employee at Macrofab dropping the ball.

I just found out very recently about these delays. I'm extremely frustrated, disappointed, annoyed and embarrassed at this whole situation. I'm still not totally certain how this happened, or what I should have done differently to prevent it, but I'm absolutely planning on finding out when I'm in Houston later this week, and I'm going to do everything I can to speed things up while I'm there.

Updated Timelines

Based on the information I have today, here are the updated delivery timelines:

February 22 - 23: I will be visiting Macrofab in to do final QA and kit assembly on the first small-batch production run of 100 orders fabricated in Houston. These orders will ship to the earliest early-bird and early-adopter Kickstarter backers the week of February 27.

Week of March 5: We're expected to receive the batch of 500 orders from the Mexico assembly facility. These will do a brief QA stop in Houston and then ship to you all ASAP. This batch should satisfy all the early-bird and early-adopter backers and some others that backed the project in November.

Late March: The remaining Kickstarter rewards and post-Kickstarter pre-orders will be here, hopefully by the end of March, but possibly not until early April. We're currently trying to figure out how to make this go faster.

In the Meantime

While we continue to wait, I'm going to continue to create more video content and online documentation, focus on finishing up the Home Assistant integration work which has stalled a little bit, keep working on new software features, and continue to scale up the Konnected team here so we can support all of you.

I'm very sorry about the delays, and please know that I'm doing my best to try to minimize the impact as much as possible. 

I'll have an update from Houston later in the week!

Nate

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