News and research

Progress report #29

30 May 2025  <- Previous

Alpakka 1.0 fully released now

We are proud to announce 100% of the Alpakka 1.0 pre-orders have been fulfilled, and the shop queue has been reduced to zero, meaning that we also delivered all the orders that came after the release (technically not pre-orders but still waiting on the same queue).

It took 2 months and a half to catch up on all orders (from March 12th to May 30th), but the overall period was almost 6 months since the pre-orders were open (Alpakka 1.0 announcement).

This has been a great effort that pushed our processes to the limit, before and after publishing the 1.0 reference designs, including:

• Finding the right wireless solution (took us a big chunk of 2023 development time).
• Assessing the feedback from the community, and preparing a plan for the 1.0 hardware/software.
• Defining a deadline in which we are confident the development can be done.
• Pushing the limits of the 3D printers (and breaking some).
• Doing the manual labor of quality checking the parts.
• Preparing and boxing the orders.
• Providing customer support if something goes wrong.

Now we can go back into "normal" operations mode, in which we prepare a small buffer of parts, and orders can be processed immediately. Also we can now allocate more time for development (features and fixes).

Kapybara and Alpakka next steps

We had the Kapybara tester sign-up open for ~3 weeks, now we are going to evaluate the submissions, contact the applicants, and hopefully select between 5 and 10 testers to move forward.

The next step will be to start making Kapybara mockups (3D-printed non-functional models) for determining the best device shape and buttons placement, and distribute them among the testers. We also expect additional self-supporting testers to 3D-print the mockups by themselves and provide feedback too.

But we are not going to be focusing 100% on the Kapybara, we also expect to work on Alpakka and Ctrl app updates in parallel. The firmware 1.1.0 milestone is already in the works, and will include important fixes and a few quality-of-life improvements.

Thanks for the support and the patience! 🤍
- Michael and Marcos