String and Stone
Hey all!
First of all, we have some news to share, in concert with another Kickstarter you might have heard about:
We’re pleased to announce that Twine will talk to the Pebble smartwatch. In Twine’s web app, you’ll be able to relay word of real-world events, like a basement flooding or a door opening, to the Pebble on your wrist. Welcome to the future!
Eric and the rest of the Pebble people are true gentlemen, and we’re happy to be working together to make your world even more connected. This idea got rolling when Nathan, a backer of both our projects, made the suggestion. And we expect that once again, you’ll come up with more great ideas that will surprise us!
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On to the work we’ve been doing lately. You may notice the sneak peak for Twine’s web app in the video above. Jay and John have refined it inside and out, and it’s built for future expansion. There’s still work to be done on the action modules (what happens after ‘THEN’), the compiler that turns rules into Twine code, and making the whole chain from web to Twine nice and strong. We’ll take an in-depth look in a future update.
In hardware news, we’re near the end of our engineering slog. One big milestone has been checked off: we’ve ordered the production tooling for the cases! That’s one big item off John’s plate. The design is cast in stone, so to speak (actually, $20,000 worth of metal), and we’ll be getting the first injection-molded parts from Minnesota in two weeks. Which is great timing, as our first lot of circuit boards (the guts that make Twine work) are going to the assembler in New Hampshire on Monday.
Hardware development always has surprises waiting for you, and we’ve endured prototypes (and a laptop) being stolen from our car, material samples being stolen from our doorstep, molds for a component breaking, uncountable prototypes snapping, exceeding the world supply of a part, and more overnight shipping than you could imagine. But the light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter - thank you for your patience and companionship on this trip!
Finally, a bit of news about Supermechanical. This summer we’re moving to Austin, Texas, which we estimate will make us 60% sunnier. It’s a great technology hub in which to grow our vision. And we’ll be hiring there! If you’re fluent in Python, embedded C, EAGLE or JavaScript, and are excited about connecting lonely objects, check out our job posts.
— John
