I have started to see a trend… It seems often you release prototype pictures and specs for products then months later the final revisions seem cut down from the original. For example the “Chatter” I seen and “backed” in a sense had well marked buttons on silkscreen, a li-Po battery and a real antenna/antenna jack. Though a new image posted 3hrs or so on Facebook shows a cheaper cut down PCB(no silkscreen for buttons much smaller), no li-Po or likely charging circuitry(replaced with normal x3 AAA batteries?), no real antenna (a reduced range wire antenna) and cheaper piezo beeper.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind revisions and refining the designs, but it seems they are always to reduce cost and in turn the quality of the final product and become close to a bait and switch each time to what was originally showed.
“Chatter’s circuit board with a built-in network communication module
Antenna
Display board – 160*128 TFT color display
Li-Po battery
Acrylic casing
A bag of other small components such as resistors and pushbuttons
An instruction booklet – ready for your offline knowledge consumption”
This is a photo of a prototype that is not finished yet.
We had to do design changes. The changes are always necessary to make the products work since the photos from the kickstarter campaign were just prototypes.
I will explain the changes in detail when we have everything ready, please stay tuned for newsletters and Kickstarter updates.
We are giving all we’ve got to deliver the best products possible.
I do not agree with your claim that our revisions are made with the sole intention to drive the costs down.
We deeply care about the satisfaction of our customers and perform the changes to make all our products as enjoyable as possible.
In example, Jay-d’s final design has much more memory and LEDs than the protoype shown, wheelson has two more motors, more ram, and a twice bigger battery compared to the original design.
This particular chatter protoype shown in the photo has a dual core CPU that is twice as expensive compared to the original prototype shown on Kickstarter.
I will explain all the design changes in detail once they are final.
I do not wish to convey they are done only with cost in mind, but perhaps it is best to say that some charm of a product is lost in multiple revisions. While Wheelson did get two motors, it also lost it’s true to life turning capability that is similar to a real car. In the revision of Chatter the loss of the antenna jack looses much of the potential to try different antennas (test range) or to create a custom weather resistant 3D printed enclosure.
Wheelson’s turning mechanism proved too easy to break, the change was more expensive and necessary to improve the overall assembly and usage experience.
I will post more info about chatter’s changes in a Kickstarter update shortly.
Don’t know if this is related or not but I finished building my chatters last night and gave them a try. I found out they work within a 10m range or so. I’m truly disappointed as I can’t even use them from one side of the apartment to the other… Is this linked with the changes?
