CE for Babies October Update

Nothing Terrible has Happened! 🎉

TLDR; Computer Engineering for Babies books are on the boat and should be here in mid-November, and then I'll be shipping them out as quick as I can just in time for Christmas!

The long painful version:

I feel like I'm constantly playing a game of "hurry up and wait." All the books were finished a few weeks ago, but they were just loaded onto the boat two or three days ago. Some of them are destined for the US, but there are also books headed to fulfillment warehouses in the UK and the Netherlands. I'm working with a new logistics company, freightcore.io, and they told me that the books should arrive in Long Beach around Nov 11th, and then will take another 4 days to get unloaded and shipped to my storage unit in Salt Lake City. The first two batches of books I had them shipped to my house, and they showed up Easter morning with 140 boxes of books at my front door. Since then my wife hasn't been very excited about storing books in our living room.

So Computer Engineering for Babies debuted on Kickstarter about 1 year ago. Since then, we've had 3 batches of books, and with each one I have had to individually reprogram each book. Adding steps to reprogram each book basically triples the time it takes to get it shipped out. The reason I've had to reprogram the books each time is because I keep making changes to the design of the book. The first batch I just hadn't done enough testing (that's probably true of every batch). But then the second batch I was trying to make the book work better in low light conditions so I was changing resistor values on the circuit board (and then again didn't test the code thoroughly enough). Then the chip shortage came for me between the second and third batch of books, and I was forced to swap for a new microcontroller chip. That created several months of delays testing and samples and testing, and again, the books showed up and didn't work quite right. But with this upcoming batch, I have not made any changes to the book, and haven't heard any rumors from the manufacturer that books aren't working properly (with previous batches, they would email me saying these like, "some of these books aren't turning off..."). So I am expecting that they are going to work out of the box. However, I must have mild PTSD as I am still living in fear that I am wrong, and that they'll all need to be reworked.

Lastly, I've also hired a handful of friends and family to help ship out these books, so come mid-November, we should have 3-4 people a day working to box up these books and get them sent out pretty quickly (especially since we won't be reprogramming them, fingers crossed). In fact, if you know any college students in the Salt Lake area that want to pick up some shifts and learn how to use a tape gun, let me know.

Cheers!
Chase