It's Update Time! Schedule, Refunds, Other Docks, Chinese Docks
over 8 years ago
– Fri, Oct 09, 2015 at 12:28:53 AM
Schedule
Our factory has told us to expect delivery of our pre-production approval sample Hydradock about Oct. 19th. Since all components are already in inventory (from the delay period), mass production will happen swiftly after that — within a couple or three weeks, followed by HydraDocks being shipped to all points of the world to backers.
Refunds
We still get the occasional refund request.
All the money from this campaign (and much more) has been paid out or is reserved to cover costs to fulfill our commitments, so we cannot send any money to anyone. However, we can ship a great product that works as promised, and beat everybody else out there in the process.
Other Docks
As far as we can tell, we will be shipping HydraDock at least 2 to 3 months before any other multi-port USB-C dock actually ships from anybody else. OWC has (at one point) mentioned an October ship date on the pre-orders they are taking, but has removed all mention of a ship date now. Our suppliers say that OWC cannot ship before early next year due to component supply constraints. The Hub+ (the only other such dock announced) is likely and always was likely to be non-existent. The dock announced by Plugable is on an early 2016 schedule, and doesn’t fully support USB 3.1 data speeds. The KADi Port may or may not even be a real product…
So, as far as docks with full USB 3.1/USB-C support, Ethernet, display support, we are the only one coming in the next month, with the one from OWC probably showing up around CES in mid-January, and the others very much unknown situations.
Chinese Docks
Amazon, eBay and other venues are starting to fill up with so-called “USB-C docks” from anonymous China suppliers. And, some of our backers are contacting us about these products.
Understand: These are NOT USB-C docks. They are USB 3.0 docks that have had a USB Type C male plug put on the end of the cable.
These products do not support USB-C Power Delivery specification and will not function with any USB-C peripherals plugged into them. They will also not support any USB-C specific embedded data protocols (such as DisplayPort Alt Mode), nor will they handle full USB 3.1 SuperSpeed data interchange or ID sensing/acknowledgement with peripherals or the USB 3.1 SuperSpeed data rates at 5Gb/sec and 10Gb/sec.
In fact, without a USB-C/3.1 hub controller (or 3 hub controllers, like the HydraDock) inside to manage devices NOTHING PLUGGED INTO THEM can connect at greater than USB 2.0 full speed data rates. Forget 5 Gb/sec. You’re stuck at 12 Mb/sec. You see, computers with the USB-C port require a device ID handshake (and a USB 3.1 compliant data cable) to ramp up to anything faster than USB 2.0 full speed data rates.
Maybe even more relevant: Note that these products have zero USB-C hub ports — despite the whole industry moving to USB-C over the coming year, and a wave of new peripherals coming that leverage the amazing new capabilities of USB-C. Buy one of these, and you can’t use any of those new products.
Beware the China junk on Amazon, eBay, and elsewhere our friends. All of the “USB-C” products we see out there now are simply USB 3 devices repurposed with a new connector cable, and support zero actual USB-C/USB v3.1 functionalities.
And… we are in the final stretch ahead of HydraDock production. :-)
So, thanks again to all of you! And, hang in there. It’s almost done now!
The KickShark Team
Back In Action!
over 8 years ago
– Tue, Oct 06, 2015 at 12:00:15 AM
Hi everybody!
We will “soon” have a real, actual, shipping HydraDock. But, if you’ve looked at our updates/comments, you see that we’re at an odd moment where parts are finally available, but the whole production process has been shut down for awhile and taken off everyone’s schedules, and then the 2 week National Day holiday break happened. So, this week, folks in China will begin drifting back to work, and we’ll be sorting through it all and figuring out a realistic ship date that we can stand by.
Where we left off was with photos of the first-shot enclosure, and information that the new video demux chip samples were at the PC board shop, and a sample PC board was going to be assembled for testing. We haven’t heard anything new through this morning as we are posting this update.
IF IF IF this picks back up with some degree of luck and some motivated action from the factory and suppliers, we should have a final, tested, working sample that can be demonstrated in about two weeks. Here, in our US office.
At that point, we’ll submit the final quantity for the mass production run, things will go onto schedules, and it will move along to a likely production date of November 2nd to 5th-ish. And, over the following couple of weeks, HydraDocks will be making their way all over the world into backers’ hands.
That’s our best guess evaluation of things this Monday morning. We’ll be updating more often now since we are finally back in action mode.
Yeah — it's not the dead firm, exact timetable all of you (and all of us) actually want to know. But, it's the loose, messy reality we're dealing with here today, so we decided to share.
Thank you to each of you still hanging in there. As previously suggested, it's still apparent that we're going to have the first shipping USB-C dock, even with the chip supply problem we had to overcome.
Again: THANKS!
The KickShark Team
Short & Long Updates On HydraDock Project
over 8 years ago
– Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 12:08:42 AM
Hi everyone! We thought it was about time for an update on happenings with the HydraDock project. So, here is a short version, along with a longer version we all think will be helpful and informative for many of our backers.
Short Update
The short version is that our factory has received a small batch of pilot production video demux chips (new, revised version), and has run a few new sample boards and is completing assembly for a series of tests starting this week. There is one of the two major China annual holiday breaks coming up the last week of September and the first week of October, when everything effectively just stops. Nobody can guarantee we have test results and a production go-ahead before this National Day holiday break.
Frankly, everybody involved is hyper-cautious now — scared — due to the bad chip incident throwing the whole plan off track earlier — us included. How can we possibly make firm assurances of specific timing now that we’ve seen that (a) sometimes parts aren’t absolutely as believed, and (b) the effort to scramble and get a derailed project back on track is profoundly more effort than we could imagine.
At the moment, our supply chain will not tell us anything other than a vague “best effort” response to any questions about timing — leaving us to basically guess. Our sense is that this new board spin is going to be fine, and we will be able to do our mass production run sometime shortly after the National Day holiday break.
Now, the longer answer…
Many of us at KickShark have many years or decades of product development and manufacturing experience, and have been through every imaginable kind of project, from the ones that sail smoothly along as hoped, to the ones that hit all sorts of crazy barriers and take a lot more time and effort than intended. The unique thing about kickstarting such a project is that we have to give some estimate at the time of the campaign on delivery expectations. And, we then have the entire body of backers out there included in whatever process results after that point — something customers of ready made products never see.
Because it is your money paying the costs here to get HydraDock to mass production, we have an obligation to share at least the more significant events along the way with you guys — even when they are messy. As we hope to grow to have many such campaigns here on Kickstarter over time, this is an important learning experience for our team.
So, a few details about events so far.
As we have said, we heard the rumors in the spring of last year that Apple was planning a new MacBook of some sort with only a single USB-C port. And, over the following months our China contacts as well as words seeping out of Apple here and there seemed to validate the idea. We had already decided to take on several new USB-C products as the standard went to market. So, we added the idea of a hub for this hypothetical MacBook into the mix last summer, and began tracking down component suppliers.
By January-February of this year we had developed a circuitry schematic for an 11 port hub based on chips soon to be sampling and planned for mass production by summer. This is while also putting together the plans for the car charger and iPhone adapter, and a couple of other USB-C gadgets we haven't announced yet.
So, when Apple announced the new MacBook in March, we were here with a vetted schematic for an 11 port hub, only needing to set the board and enclosure dimensions and have a layout designed for samples — which we cranked up immediately. By the end of March we had sample boards populated with sample chips, and were doing live testing — staying up nights to cooperate with chip houses on daily firmware revisions, trying to get to a fully working product sample.
We made a couple of rapid prototype plastic enclosures for the sample board design, and continued testing and modifying boards, going through two very expensive batches of short run sample boards and sample component sets, as we fried each one in succession doing power testing and display testing.
On the evening of April 8th, working with our last remaining functional test board, we loaded a new firmware update, and lit our reference Apple LED Cinema Display successfully at a glorious 2,560 x 1,440 resolution. We put that board into an enclosure, went into the studio, and shot the footage for our campaign video using that board. Why? Because we had proof that the components and schematic design were close enough to right that any changes would be minor and would result in a quick process leading to mass producing this design. And, we knew speed was everything with a new MacBook hub campaign.
In other words, we knew we could deliver the product. So, we asked all of our suppliers what order minimums they required and the terms and expected delivery dates, and we set the funding goal, and the expected production date, and posted our Kickstarter campaign on April 15.
On May 15, the campaign ended. But, we did not receive the Kickstarter funds into our bank until May 24th. We prepaid several items from our own funds, and then prepaid most of the remaining charges using the Kickstarter funds. And, the process you all know since that time got underway.
What we haven’t discussed is that we were warned back in March that the size of the circuit board we had developed was possibly too small for best functionality, as it created some high heat spots, as well as put traces too close in a few places for best EMI rejection. These were not strong concerns — not strong enough for us to delay the project for a new board and enclosure design process.
But, once the video demux chip delay happened, we realized that we then had time to make the suggested board and enclosure redesigns, even though this would mean paying a second enclosure tooling charge, without introducing any more delay — we could do it while waiting on the new video chips.
So, that’s what we’ve done. The new enclosure + board is about an inch deeper than what’s shown on our campaign. But, it has more than enough clearance between traces, and significantly more material in the traces that carry the highest power loads, making it a much more durable design. We were also able to source and include a better Mini DisplayPort jack that makes all of the ports line up better. And, the new tooling molds were completed Friday, and first shot enclosure samples are being produced now, to coincide with the new boards. So, for once, something happened as planned, without adding any delays. :-)
All of this is the sort of scrambling decision making and actions that customers never see in the product development process, but that are exposed to Kickstarter backers.
Finally, we want to openly discuss money — something rarely done on Kickstarter.
During the year before launching this campaign, we put around $45,000 of our own money into getting to the board development point we reached with HydraDock (along with the two cable products). Since then, we have paid just over $85,000 for component orders, the initial tooling charge of $21,000, and a second tooling charge of $23,600. Our early product unit cost estimate was $43 each FOB Shenzhen, which would have given us a USA landed cost of about $50, which is in line with a suggested retail price of $249.
In reality, our final unit cost (which we now know) is $73 each, for a US landed cost of nearly $80 each. At the industry standard 5X multiplier, this would indicate a suggested retail price of $399 — which is clearly not possible. There are two significant results of this disparity from intended costs and actual costs.
One result of the cost change is that we are losing money on all of the $99 early bird bundle rewards, in some international shipping situations, losing over $30 per reward. We are approximately breaking even on the $129 reward bundles. And, we are making a small profit on the rewards at higher prices, including the $169 pre-orders that have continued using the BackerKit platform.
The other result is that we will not be able to sell the HydraDock through traditional distributor-retailer brick and mortar channels, because the profit margin at $249 is not big enough to accommodate their demand for an about 70% wholesale discount. We will only be selling this product online starting this winter — not in stores.
Fortunately, we are a program with multiple streams of revenue aside from this campaign, and we can pay the extra costs to fulfill these rewards with our own cash. In all, we are looking at about $140,000 in combined Kickstarter and BackerKit pre-orders, against about $230,000 in actual costs to complete everything — with us making up the about $90,000 shortfall from our own pockets. This excludes the about $4,000 we spent shipping everyone free iPhone cables.
The point here is that we have learned lots of lessons so far — ones that will inform our choices with all future crowdfunding campaigns. We also have had a clear look at how easily some campaigns for hardware products can quickly get so sideways that they are never fulfilled. If the only activity we had producing revenue was this campaign, we would be in trouble right now, as there would be no money to cover that $90,000 shortfall.
Other Products
Finally, at the risk of some controversy, we want to make a statement about what we have seen with a handful of other USB-C products announced elsewhere or launched on Kickstarter about the time we launched — with one Kickstarter campaign in particular frustrating us. Each of these claims to have only begun work on their product when the MacBook was announced in March — which is absurd at face value.
We expected a $500,000 range campaign, due to the advance work we had put in ahead of launching, and the maturity of our project, and the completeness of our product design. We had a working BOM and schematic. We knew the components, their makers, and all of the lead times and costs and functionalities, as well as the availability of any manufacturer reference designs and firmware, etc., all needed to get a real product developed, made, and shipped.
We knew what was possible with available components and what was not possible. We knew the amount of space and the costs of the circuitry underlying all of these features.
All of this gave us the ability to glance at any other product announcement and know immediately if it was imaginary or real. And, when a product that was impossibly small, at an impossibly low price, claiming impossible features that would require components not possible to obtain anywhere on earth appeared shortly after we launched, we were stunned. We alerted Kickstarter about that campaign and were ignored. In fact, shortly thereafter, Kickstarter made the campaign a Staff Pick. And, we watched in amazement as thousands of backers chose to back an impossible, fictional product that can never be manufactured over our real product that was based on real-world realities.
Because that fictional product drew everyone away from our campaign, we hit $80,000 in backing, not $500,000 or more. And, as that situation continues to roll off into whatever future result it meets, we are working hard here to put the final touches on our project and deliver real products to our backers.
You’ll all hear back from us after the Chinese holiday break with what we hope is exciting news on several fronts ahead of making and shipping your products. Below are some CAD snapshots of the final HydraDock design...
Thank you for backing us and taking this journey with us!
Mike, Kristin, Bo, Jack, Sonya, Jonathan, Ryan, Jeff, Andrey, and Danielle
The KickShark Team
HydraDock Production Update & Release Schedule
over 8 years ago
– Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 05:25:59 AM
It has been a while since we posted an update, as we have had a real issue getting credible information from our supply chain about the for-real schedule and expectations for mass producing the HydraDock. Now, we have pressed and have pulled together the information we think allows us to make some firm statements.
This is incredibly frustrating for all of us, and we can only again apologize for the delay.
To recap for new readers, in mid-July when approximately on track to hit our intended manufacture and ship dates, we received 1,025 of the video demux chip used in the HydraDock, along with the other components, and our factory built a trial batch for testing. Everything worked, including Mini DisplayPort — except the HDMI output played for a few seconds and then became a garbled mess. A week was lost testing to see if it was a firmware problem. Then, the chip factory determined that it was a silicon level hardware problem affecting the video buffer memory. They let us know that they would have to do “a new spin” of the chip design, and then a new production run. They said that process would take “at least 4 to 6 weeks.”
We posted an update with this information on July 13th, and basically put everything related to the HydraDock on pause. We did send everybody a free USB-C iPhone cable as an apology gift. But otherwise, we have been impatiently trying to keep tabs on this chip remaking effort and how it will impact our project timing.
The chip factory says that they have been very cautious and it has taken more time to get the job done than intended, and that they are sorry. Our factory has not been able to schedule any SMT board assembly dates without a firm delivery commitment for the new demux chips. And, there the situation has sat for a few weeks.
We have now been told that we will have a new trial run test of the boards by September 15. And, if the tests are good (which they should be), board production, assembly, packaging, and shipping can all be scheduled. And, the HydraDock will be birthed and begin getting into your hands the first week or so of October.
Not a good situation. But, at least, finally, we have solid dates to work with.
For those who have asked for or are thinking about asking for a “refund,” we need to say clearly that the funds for this project are all committed to the process of building and delivering the quantity commitment we’ve contracted with our factory. Crowdfunding isn’t selling products individually, but funding a whole project as a single thing. At this point that whole process is funded and paid (or reserved). There is no money for returning individual pledges — at least not without putting the entire project at risk.
So, that’s where we are. We are sorry for all of this, and it’s not at all what was hoped or wanted. We planned for our first big Kickstarter project to be a textbook example of everything done right and on time.
In any case, that is the situation. Mass production will happen about October 1st. And, shipments will then go out by air freight to our Asia, US, and EU Shipwire warehouse locations and then out to all of you by regional courier delivery.
As a side note, despite this frustrating delay, HydraDock will still be (by months) the first and only multi-port USB-C hub to actually ship to end users. We know all (the few) USB-C silicon vendors, and we know the status of the few other projects out there —including the others that have been here on Kickstarter. And, we are months ahead of them on actual delivery. Many months. Lots of months.
So, thank each of you for helping us with this crazy attempt to change the Macbook world for the better, and for tolerating what we consider being inexcusably, horrifically late. We’ve alerted the factory to get us images and video of milestone events (first good boards, first assembled HydraDock, products ready to ship, etc.), and we’ll share these events as they occur.
Thanks so much to all of our amazing backers!
The KickShark Team
