I wanted to give a special shout out to Chris and wish him a Happy and Healthy Birthday.

Chris and I got introduced last year when he was one of the first customers. Like many of you, he and I became friends and since then, he’s been an amazing help and support. He even wrote up the famous XBMC article that was published.

Happy Birthday Chris!

I’m so pleased to announce that we’re partnering with Njoy Digital in Europe. Njoy Digital offers a number of amazing products and I am happy to be a part of their product portfolio. This will help with European distribution and dreadful 4-8 week ship times. They currently have limited stock, so get them while you can.

I’m also evaluating some of their amazing products hoping to offer those to US costumers as well. The flirc store will be expanding in the next few months so stay tuned for some neat personal and partner additions.

Here is a list of our Partners

Direct Link to Flirc on Njoy Digital.

It’s always a full time job trying to build more flircs. That will be a next step, try and figure out how to procure parts and ship them to the manufacturer without all this trouble. Each time gets easier, but nevertheless, it’s always painful. Something always goes wrong, this times it was Chinese customs.

100 samples of the new PCB returned and I had 99/100 work. That’s pretty good yield, and I’ll look into why the one didn’t work. This is a slightly modified PCB to address build issues.

Those 99 went out almost immediately to customers and more pre-orders should go out this week. I rushed a subset of the build to arrive next week, and those should fulfill all the pre-order needs. So we’re certainly in good shape.

Another update to come shortly.

I failed to update the blog these past couple of weeks and I apologize for that. I thought I would at the very least give a brief update of progress.

Things are going very well and I’ve made tremendous  improvements to the build system. I’ve pretty much solved all technical hurdles I was struggling with and have it about 85% complete. It’s sustainable, scalable, and will allow me to cross build, deploy, and solve all my shared library issues. I have static analyzers as part of the build system and many many more improvements.

I’m at the point now where I can start ripping apart the code and improving on it. It was absolutely necessary that I fixed the build system before continuing development. My git repository was an absolute cluttered and broken mess with branches going no where.

All this time I’ve been mapping out how to restructure the firmware. My goal is to have major releases by the end of the month of both the firmware and the GUI.

I’m also completely out of inventory. I have a sample test batch coming wednesday which took the manufacturers way to long to make. Should those be good, the first 100 pre-orders will go out immediately and I will start the next major build.

On a separate note, does anyone use twitter anymore? I occasionally get new followers and am curious if people actually like twitter as a line of communication. Let me know in the comments. I haven’t used it in quite a while.

As promised, I wanted to give everyone an update.

Not a big one today, I’m still working on the software build system, which isn’t done. Getting stuck on a technical problem, I took a break from that and am working on firmware development.

I’m re-structuring all my code so I can solve these bugs with sleep, sticky buttons, and long presses. I’ve begun strengthening my algorithm to better support other remotes and so you don’t have to record keys twice with the RC6 protocol. I’ve also completely revamped things a bit so the firmware works differently. Previously, the firmware would set an interrupt  back to the host on the event of a button being recorded. Anyone familiar with libusb, set_interrupt(), this function blocking. Which means that in order to write the host side software, I needed a separate thread to wait in set_interrupt. This isn’t good and made my API terrible, confusing, and easy to get wrong when I release the software.

Now, the flirc firmware uses a state machine for recording. The host PC can ask flirc the current ‘state’ in a polled mode, which means that I don’t need a separate thread.

This doesn’t mean much for customers other than it’s the beginning of me getting back into firmware development. For developers looking to integrate flirc into products, this actually means a lot.

I’ve also begun working on something ultra cool, and I’ve got some of that up and running. Hopefully I can make an announcement in a couple of weeks.

Until next week…

With the release of windows 8, there is an issue with the Flirc drivers because they weren’t signed. Windows 8 doesn’t allow installation of unsigned drivers enforcing you to basically turn all signature recognition off. Although, it just asked me if I wanted to ‘install the driver anyways’, but nonetheless, plenty of people wrote in here.

I created signed drivers and attached them to the bottom of the forum.

I’ll make these official as soon as I get a tad bit of feedback, but they will be incorporated into the installer so you wont have to manually do an installation through device manager.

On the software front I’m still cleaning up, re-vamping my build system. Today I got working a tool called NSIS on OSX. That creates an installer for windows. Why is that awesome? From my new build system and on my mac, not only will everything get compiled and updated, but I will be able to cross compile a windows executable and then even make the installer. I don’t need windows anymore to do any development or deployment, just test.

The hardware front is going smoothly too. I updated the boards to help with yield, as I previously mentioned in my last blog entry. I’m expecting 100 sample boards to get back to test soon.

I mentioned I would follow up with how I planned on improving yield, so I’ll share that as well when I get some more time.

I’m going to make a huge effort to update the blog once a week. I want to do a better job of letting everyone know that I’m still working extremely hard on making this product perfect.

As I mention repeatedly to supportive and patient customers, it’s just me here. I have a couple friends that help, but their help is minimal when it comes to the time needed. I do shipping, logistics, support, development, the web work, reaching out, manufacturing, debugging, you name it, and it’s all on the side of a very demanding full time job at a startup. It’s rough. I work 80 hours a week, sometimes a lot more. But I do it because I love it, and I’m not complaining.

But as a result of the work and attention required, I’ve been forced to get organized, and to be intelligent in the way I do things. I’ve learned a lot, and I want to be as open as possible in hopes that what I’ve learned can help someone else. Because the truth is, I’ve learned a lot from other people, to the point where I’m not quite sure how I would have gotten over some very big hurdles. Joe, the CEO of Saleae, is extremely open on his blog. He does a phenomenal job of communicating with customers. Sparkfun is another example of a company that is extremely open with their products and growing pains. I’ve at times, contacted them, or others with questions, and with no obligation, they have helped me. I was even recently featured on a sparkfun interview, and it was such an honor. I’m hoping that those who understand what flirc is, where it came from, and what I hope to accomplish feel comfortable in approaching me if they are struggling with something that I may have accomplished.

As everyone knows, I’ve been doing a lot of behind the scenes work, and I’m sorry to say software and firmware have been extremely slow going. But I’m cleaning up. I was forced to figure out how to get orders out without killing myself, and I’ve got it. Shipstation has been my saving grace. They nailed it when no other company has even come close.

I found a relatively new service to help with support called help scout. It’s amazing, clean, simple, and helps me stay on top of customer emails. Nothing will get lost anymore, and I can better keep track of dangling emails that need response. I’m very happy with it so far. I changed the website so all emails going into the support link, email to support@flirc.tv, and get routed to help scout. It no longer goes to my flirc inbox. Any emails leaving the site for registration, order status updates, lost passwords, come from noreply@flirc.tv. While that seemed obvious, for the longest time it was also coming from my own flirc email address. Customers would just hit reply, and my email box was filled with important emails and junk. Now, my email will be held strictly for business and staying on top of manufacturing, working with partners, and that’s it. I can manage support at help scout, and it will help me stay on top of everything by letting me know how long I’ve been taking to get back to people.

On the development side, I’m revamping things as well. I’m changing everything in my git repository, cleaning up all my code, re-structing all the firmware, and getting my tool chains cleaned up. Software is a mess right now and it takes too long to try anything out and deploy stuff for customers to try. I rely on Eric, my partner, for deploying the windows GUI. In fact, he does an amazing job as he’s done 95% of the GUI work. But when I want to add something, it’s too much work. I rely on virtual machines galore. That’s all getting solved. I am fixing my cross compilers, so that I’ll be able to make windows, mac, and linux GUI’s directly on my mac with one command. It’s going to be phenomenal and result in much faster beta’s that will be posted to the forums. Once that’s done, I will publish the API with doxygen, and shortly after, fix these stupid beta images, make one image that combines them all, and find out what’s wrong with waking the computer up from sleep.

If anyone is interested in hearing about some of the electrical problems that I’m having which effect yield, leave a comment and I can follow up with some pictures and how I intend on fixing them.

Thanks everyone for all the amazing support.

Thought I would share the exciting news that I’ve passed American, European, Australia, and New Zealand certification testing. I’m legally allowed to sell in those areas, and open communication to distributors.

Everything went great, and I passed without a hitch. Here is a neat picture of the first stage of the testing, it’s called an Anechoic Chamber.

They have a very large expensive antenna pointed at flirc. The antenna rotates and also moves up and down. The table the laptop is sitting on, also rotates. They measure with the antenna any emitting frequency spikes on a spectrum analyzer, and compare that against a maximum allowance. I’ll post a picture of what that chart looks like. The emissions from the setup has to be less than a certain amount across all frequencies.

Another test was called immunity, which meant that I had to withstand a shock of up to 6kV. Luckily, the device is well insulated, and there were no sparks, so I passed.

Admittedly, I’ve been horrible recently with both communication and development. However, that’s not to say I’m still not putting my heart into the project, I just haven’t done as much as I wanted to do on the firmware/GUI side. I am working endlessly behind the scenes trying to slim down on the cost, manufacturing, and distribution side.

I found a programming house called A&J Programming. It’s in San Jose, which is great, because it’s local. They specialize in programming parts. I used them for this most recent build, and I’m pretty excited I don’t have to manually program 2000 parts. Although, Eric and I (mostly Eric) worked extremely hard on making a programming fixture. It works great, but when the demand increased a bit, I was absolutely miserable.

For the shipping, I’ve done a number of things to help get orders out. I recently found a company called shipstation, which has been my saving grace. I use an e-commerce store called lemonstand, and while they nailed product management and selling online, they haven’t figured out how to handle getting your actual products out. I had to manually go to the USPS website for each order. I’m sorry for my language, but the USPS website is shit. It’s slow, they don’t support non-standard characters, so for people in Sweden, I couldn’t have any characters like: ö . If the order did contain any of these characters, I had to manually go through each field and change them. My life was miserable and most of the labels created through their own website was missing tracking bar codes. Every time I would make a trip to the post office, I’d get asked, “why did you remove the bar code”. Yes USPS employee, I went out of my way to remove to remove the $@^%ing bar code…

Shipstation imports all your orders, allows you to batch create shipping labels, they work with label printers, and automatically updates your orders in lemonstand. I was so happy with the purchase, I left them a very deserving review.

The best thing about shipstation, is they allow me to batch create ‘first class postage’ labels. In the store live for the past few weeks, is an alternative shipping method which is much cheaper, and doesn’t seem to be any slower. This was by far the biggest complaint, and well deserving being that shipping was over half the cost of the product. I’m really ecstatic about it.

As far as distribution, it’s an entirely different game. For me to find distributors, I need to have FCC/CE certification. While this isn’t a big deal, it’s expensive. However, I’m happy to say that I’m doing it now.  In a few weeks, once that it is done, I’ll push inventory to a few distributors where shipping options will be even better for customers. If anyone is interested in becoming a distributor, please e-mail me.

We have made improvements on the GUI and firmware side, which we will hopefully polish off and push soon. I know I have completely dropped the ball on promised features. Between my full time job, working on flirc, taking care of my family, I don’t take a moment of rest, seven days a week.

I just received some stock and will be getting orders ready over the weekend to drop off at the post on Monday. All preorders will be trickling out over the next couple weeks.