modue UPDATE 26.0
Hi moduers! 🎛
If you haven’t followed every update, here’s the big news first: we’re in China, at the factory, and the first mass production of modue has begun.
A quick reminder of how we got here. In early 2024, more than 1,000 of you backed modue on Kickstarter and Indiegogo: a modular control deck with a touch screen, a motorised fader, knobs and keys that snap together. Since then we’ve been through prototypes, tester units, EMC tests and more redesigns than we’d like to admit. Now the founding team is on the factory floor for a month, setting up the line that will build the modules going to your desks.
For a small team from Poland, this is huge. It’s the moment modue stops being a prototype on our desks and becomes a product on yours.
Here’s what happened in our first week, and over the last month.
Test fixtures: built in Poland, debugged in China
We have three test fixtures planned, and you can already see two of them below:
- Bed-of-nails fixture for the PCBs. Gold-plated pins touch the test points on each board, so before assembly we can check that the board was put together correctly and works as it should.
- Component fixture. It tests the LED boards, displays and interface boards.
- Functional fixture. The final check on the fully assembled module: buttons, slider, LEDs, encoders, screens and touch.
Before we left, we assembled and tested the bed-of-nails and functional fixtures in Poland, along with the software for the functional one. The bed-of-nails fixture gave us some trouble. We fixed it here in China, with a lot of help from our wonderful manufacturers.
A quick shoot with the golden samples
Right before the flight we squeezed in a quick photo shoot with our golden samples. Here’s one of the shots. You’ll see more in the coming weeks.
The app: a first look at the new UI
We’re working hard to make the app run better, and we’re building in the feedback we collected during testing. We don’t want to show too much yet, but here’s a teaser of the new UI.
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We also completely redesigned the widgets on the module screens as it was shown in the last update!
Week one: on the road
We spent most of the first week driving between suppliers. We’re meeting the most important ones in person, starting with the ones where problems have to be solved first.
Parts are arriving
- Magnetic connectors have been delivered! The boxes in the photo are only half of what this batch needs.
- Potentiometers and encoders are here too, and the first inspection is done.
- Glass panels for One Touch, Spin and Click have arrived. We’re still waiting for the Slide glass panels. We’re keeping our fingers crossed, because glass has caused us some trouble in the past.
- Master boxes! These are the big cartons that will carry your modules to the logistics center.
modue is officially CE and FCC compliant
We wrote a lot about EMC testing in the last update. Now it’s final: modue passed every EMC test, and we have the reports in hand. That makes modue officially CE and FCC compliant.
That also means we can ship modue legally across the EU and the US, so there shouldn’t be any problems getting it to you.
Aluminium: our biggest bottleneck right now
We visited the company that makes our aluminium enclosures. Right now this is the biggest bottleneck we have. We had to cover extra costs for new aluminium tooling, and when we inspected the first parts, some of them needed rework.
In the next few days we should receive a batch that will show the direction we’re taking with cosmetics. We really want our aluminium to be top-tier when it comes to surface finish, so we’re putting a lot of time into it (we’re inspecting all of the parts one by one to be sure that what you get is what we want). We hope you’ll agree it was worth it.
The aluminium is also what decides our shipping date. More on that below.
What’s next
We’re aiming to deliver modue to you before Christmas. To get there, we’re still calculating how many production lines we need to run, and the aluminium enclosures are the piece that decides it. We’d rather not spend the holidays at the factory, but if that’s what it takes, we will.
So far we’ve been able to solve most problems as they come up, and we’re fighting hard to keep things moving in the right direction. We’ve been sleeping a bit too little this week, but things moved forward!
A lot is happening right now, so you’ll hear from us more often over the coming weeks. We hope the process gets you as excited as it gets us. We’ll keep you posted.
[Only for Kickstarter Backers and Indiegogo Contributors]
One thing we need from you: if you haven’t finished your PledgeBox survey (address + shipping payment), please do it now. November 16 is the absolute final date. Right after that we plan the whole delivery route with our logistics partner, and after that we can’t add anyone to the first batch. Surveys finished after November 16 will ship with the second batch.
Check your spam folder too. Can’t find the email? Write to contact@modue.com or open a ticket on Discord.
Curious about something on the production floor? Ask us here in the comments, on Discord or on Instagram. We show everything we can there, and we even posted a short reel recently.
We won’t pretend the road here was smooth. We made mistakes along the way, and some of them cost you time. But right now things are moving in the right direction. A big part of that is our testers, who lived with the bugs and rough edges of early units and kept sending us feedback anyway. Because of them, the modue you’ll get is a lot closer to what you actually need.
So thank you, to the testers and to every one of you reading this and following along. See you on your desks.
Cheers,
~ modue Team
