(You can also find this update on our Kickstarter page)

Happy Friday! The past week has been a busy one, we’re deep into modifying the RaceCapture app for the new RaceCapture hardware (it has a very different configuration setup compared to RaceCapture/Pro), built our first full set of boards, and did some preliminary testing.

RaceCapture App

This week Ryan spent most of his time finalizing the work needed to allow the RaceCapture app to support connecting to either RaceCapture or RaceCapture/Pro. This was no small feat as the RaceCapture app was written before even the idea of RaceCapture existed, so much of the application required rewrites.

If you want to get an idea of how detail oriented you have to be to write software, check out the GitHub ticket for supporting different hardware capabilities.

To see all the issues and features we have defined for the app for this Kickstarter, search for all tickets with the deliverable ‘Kickstarter Deliverable‘. We have a lot of features to add and bugs to fix!

Building things!

Our final printed circuit boards (PCBs) arrived this week and we did a test production run, which involves assembly via our pick ‘n place machine, reflow, drag soldering, visual inspection and integration testing.

 

 

There’s still along way to go from assembled boards to shippable product. We need to build a ‘bed of nails’ that tests all wiring connections, write and test firmware to the devices, automated & manual testing, case assembly, boxing and finally shipping. And that’s just for hardware 😉

Testing!

Building hardware is complex. Building software is complex. Building a new piece of hardware and updating 2 pieces of software (firmware and app) is very complex. The only way to really know if things work is to test in the field. Yesterday Brent took out a freshly made, still-hot-from-reflow RaceCapture board to see if everything worked. Results: success!

 

How you can help

We have a lot to do and not much time to do it! If you have some coding chops and want to help with our app, check out our GitHub issues for Kickstarter deliverables. If you’re technically savvy and want to help test, when we send out surveys for addresses be sure to volunteer to test RaceCapture for us. If you’re neither of those, spread the word about RaceCapture!

Stay tuned for more updates as progress continues!