Satnav in a bicycle bell: it navigates your every turn and learns from the cycling community to find the safest routes
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Hey!
We're really excited to start shipping Blubels out to our early backers!
We have lots going on: assembling the bells, soldering, programming and testing the PCBs. Finally, building the devices and getting all the nuts and bolts packed in the boxes.
Doing this ourselves, we're looking out for any possible flaws in the parts or assembly. We're also learning from the process to establish quality standards for the larger scale production.
For the last couple of months now we've had beta testers whizzing around with Blubels. With their help, we've been squishing some juicy software bugs! This has been invaluable to the app development and preparing it for launch.
Thanks for all your help!
Blubel team
Dear backers,
We are very sorry for the radio silence! We've been quiet over the last few weeks because we've been doing non-stop testing and debugging. Although these behind-the-scenes details are crucial, they are not particularly exciting to post about. Like glitches in code, refining calculations, testing and improving security of the system and in particular user privacy, even what adhesive is best to use for some components inside the device (thrilling stuff!).
Some shaky videos of Blubel in action...as you can see, nothing gets in the way of testing, not even the London rain...
Here Blubel indicates to go straight (blue light shows the end destination bearing, green light says "go forth"), and to turn (3 LED arrow starts flashing to say there's a turn coming, then solid for turn now). The arrow indicates the exact turn you need to make, so you don't get confused when there is more than one left or right. Also the LEDs adjust depending on whether it's bright or overcast, so it's always easy on the eyes.
And this is what happens at the end of the journey: the app remembers where you parked your bike and you can tag a location where you rung your Blubel (for instance a pothole).
We've had some back and forth with the manufacturers on a previous sample, which has taken longer than we anticipated. We now have the first batch that we are testing - so far so good, so these are ready to ship to the early backers. Here are some close ups of what the final Blubel in classic charcoal looks like. We hope you like it!
We've got the remainder coming at the end of this month, if all goes to schedule. We're currently beta testing the iOS app, and will be launching it shortly on App Store, followed by the Android one. If you'd like to get involved in the beta testing, please let us know! There are always things that can be improved and your feedback is really valuable.
We are thrilled, a bit scared, but overall super excited to hear your thoughts. Once again thank you for your support!
Blubel x
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.