Hi everyone,
It’s been awhile since we did a blog post so I thought I’d share an update about Sparks production and what we’ve been up to!
People probably want to know about shipping, so to get that out of the way, it’s looking like we’ll start shipping Sparks in mid-July (on-track with the original 8-12 week timeline we quoted). We’re still waiting for our packaging and paper manual to arrive which will be a few weeks.
In the meantime we’re building, testing, and calibrating Sparks every day. Sparks requires a lot of checks and balances at multiples stages to make sure the analog circuitry is performing correctly. And since it’s stereo, both channels have to be calibrated and matched precisely. It’s a lot of work but things are moving along well and we have good processes in place to make sure everything works as expected.
As soon as the packaging and paper manual arrive we’ll be good to start shipping out units - they’ll go out in batches in order received.
Manufacturing stuff
Last year we were toying with the idea of working with a third party manufacturer but we’ve since decided it’s best for us to keep our manufacturing in-house. In part to maintain our quality standards and also because we’ve dialed in a lot of improvements that have made production much smoother for our small team. Our local PCB manufacturer is doing more soldering work which has been a huge help. We’ve also developed more streamlined testing tools to speed up end of line testing.
A big time saver is our new testing software called KMART - the Kinotone Multiple ARbitraty Tester. It guides you through a workflow that validates all of the hardware and makes it so Hannah and Pat can do most of the quality testing for Sparks. We’ll use it for Ribbons going forward too. The name is a humorous spin on the Buchla MARF with a midwestern twist (IYKYK 
)
Ribbons is coming back
I don’t mean to distract from Sparks - we’re so excited about it and it does many incredible things that Ribbons can’t and won’t ever do. But people always ask us when Ribbons will come back and until recently we weren’t able to provide a very concrete timeline.
I’m happy to share that we’re just a few weeks away from opening orders for another run of Ribbons (in a new color too). On nights and weekends during the last several months I chipped away at a hardware redesign that allowed us to get everything on a single circuit board. It will be much easier and more cost effective for us to keep making Ribbons now.
The new version is working great on my end and we’re about to send it out to our beta team for field testing. It’s maybe worth reiterating that this is not a V2 / MKII. There will eventually be 2.0 firmware though that implements some of the updates discussed on the development blog. New features will always be available to current users.
I mentioned it briefly in this thread, but if you pre-order Sparks you’ll get first access to the next batch of Ribbons and a 15% off coupon code (~$60 off). We really appreciate everyone who has supported Sparks and we’d also like to help offset shipping costs for international users who want both.
I think that’s it for now!
We’ll leave you with some pictures from the last few weeks 
