Good news and bad news
Good news and bad news this week. Let me get the bad out of the way first.
We are launching in the US only
We had been working to bring Canada and the UK online for launch. We are stopping that work for now. Every country has its own certification to pass, its own paperwork, and its own bill, and doing all of that for a design we do not consider final is money spent twice. The gate will change before it settles down. We would rather certify the version we are going to live with than pay to certify this one three times over.
If you are outside the US, I am sorry. You are not forgotten and you are not off the list. This is a delay, not a decision about your country.
The boards work
Our first manufactured circuit boards arrived, and every one of them worked. First try.
If you have ever moved something from a hand built prototype to a real factory run, you know that is not the normal outcome. It means the manufacturer built what we designed, and it means we can place a much larger order with them once testing passes.
These are the boards that now go into emissions testing. The only thing holding that up is our final battery, which is on its way. I would very much like the next email you get from me to be the one that says we passed and pre-orders are open.
Three more printers
We bought three more 3D printers. After a last round of design checks we are turning them on and building.
Long term these cases will be injection molded, which is faster and cheaper per unit at volume. But molds are expensive and permanent, and the moment you cut one you have frozen the design. While the design is still moving, printing is the right answer. It lets us change something on Tuesday and hold it in our hands on Wednesday.
Beta testing with the family
LagKing is a father and son team, with occasional soldering help from mom.
This past week the father half took a gate to extended family and it got tested hard, by a lot of people, for several days. It performed flawlessly. Everyone had a good time, which honestly was the part I most wanted to hear. A few things they said about the app went straight into it and are already changed.
Nothing tells you more than watching people who did not build it try to use it.
GSPro, honestly
This one is not going well, and I would rather tell you than go quiet on it.
The connector I started from looked better than it turned out to be. Its cleanest integration happened to be for the launch monitor I own personally, which flattered it. The other integrations work by reading numbers off the screen, and that is as finicky and inconsistent as it sounds.
I am not giving up on it. But I want to be straight that it is a harder problem than I thought two weeks ago, and I would rather set your expectations honestly now than promise something smooth and hand you something fragile.
One good last thing
Our getting started guide is up: https://lagking.com/getting-started/
The app store links do not work yet, because the app is not published yet. Everything else is real. If you want a sense of what the device actually does, how you set it up, what the game modes are, and how the light tells you what it is thinking, it is all there. This is the guide that will be in the box.
Have a look and tell me what is confusing. Better to fix it now than in the box.