Dear Reader,

May has been an eventful month.

Second Manufacturing Run Preorders Available

The second manufacturing run of Mooshimeters is beginning!  To celebrate, we brought back the crowdfunding price – $100 – for a Mooshimeter in the next run.  We can’t offer a firm delivery date yet because we are still working out details with our subcontractors, but it should be 12-16 weeks.  Some of the final assembly processes we did ourselves on the first run (calibration, testing, final assembly, shipping) are being subcontracted, and transferring that kind of process involves a lot of detail work.

The second manufacturing run meters will be functionally identical to the original meters, but there will be minor modifications to make manufacturing easier.  For example the threaded inserts are being redesigned so the knurl doesn’t go all the way to the edge.  This makes the part both easier to machine and to overmold.

Some subcontractors have already started work, but we don’t yet have full funding so your preorders are really important!

Distribution

We’re pleased to announce our first 2 distributors!  You can now find the Mooshimeter in the Hackaday General Store.  We’re big fans of Hackaday, and their early coverage was critical to getting the Mooshimeter crowdfunding campaign off the ground.  It’s appropriate they should be the first to resell!

Roughly a third of Mooshimeters go to the EU, and international shipping and customs have been a headache for all involved.  Depending on your country, import taxes vary and the deliveries can spend a long time in customs.  This is why we’re very happy to say you can now buy a Mooshimeter directly from doodl.dk in Denmark!  The list price is higher but delivery is faster and there should be no import tax within the EU.

International Shipping Change

Up to now, international packages have all been shipped as USPS First Class International, with a meter costing $18.50 to ship.  The packages get through, but we’ve seen the delivery times vary between 1 week and 1 month.  Enough international customers have had issues receiving their packages in a timely manner that we’re upgrading to USPS Priority International (6-10 day delivery).  This raises international shipping to $25 from $18.50, but the upgrade in level of service is substantial enough to justify it.

Housekeeping

Since shipping out all the crowdfunding orders a few months ago it’s been a very transitional time, moving from a crowdfunded project to a commercial product.  There’s been a lot of non-technical work in the transition.

April is tax season in the US, and Mooshim Engineering LLC. filed for an extension.  Like many companies that run crowdfunding campaigns, the tax situation can be quite complicated, especially when presales for a product happen in one year, but delivery of the product happens in another as in our case.  This month we engaged a CPA and got our taxes up to date.  There are no business people at Mooshim Engineering LLC., the contracted CPA was a little surprised to find financial records stored in subversion.

So far this company has been almost completely an engineering endeavor, but if we want access to larger distributors we need to strengthen our business fundamentals.

What’s Next

Despite this update being much more business-oriented, technical work continues.  The firmware has been overhauled and the timing issues with the SD card mostly resolved – this should make the logging system easier to use.  It should be ready for release soon.  The iOS app is being cleaned up and a lot of user suggestions (mostly improved UI) implemented.  The codebase is being built from scratch because the app is changing language to Swift from Obj-C.  More on that as it develops.

Screenshot of new app UI in development

As always, thanks for reading!