Cancelled


Please think about who these messages are actually aimed against? They ain't faceless and I guess a lot of you think that they are aimed at Craig...


But to me they are aimed squarely at the OP team and especially the front line of them, which are people like Jack and Debs.


I've so far brought a GP2X and 2 Pandoras and I've got mine with hardly any fuss. Sure like everyone else I had to wait, but when I wanted to enquire about the status of my order I did it politely via the correct channels and _personally_ I have found the sales team to be polite, responsive and helpful.


I brought my pandys separately one prem the other batch one, both times I did not feel the need to get riled up on the interwebs behind the "masses" to get info. The sales team were helpful and great and I for one would like to thank them for all the hard work they do.


*/gets off soap box*

you know what i agree with you, the team are brilliant , i dont think this thread is anyway having a pop at them .. or on individual cases its more of a generic update thats required.


i am sure also that both jacquline and debs are overwhelmed by people asking where is my pandora, where am i on the que , maybe a status update would help relieve some of the pressure (maybe not).


i have nothing but admiration for all the OP team for what they have manage to do , its nothing short of a miracle. i suppose i just get fustrated when people leave (especially now when its so crucial) when some of it is easily correctable.
 
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Guys, the real enemy is CircuitCo. The real good guys are OP; who else tells customers how things are going behind the scenes?
 
^ "The enemy", "the good guys"? What is this, a comic book? ;)


Really, seriously, now, I don't think that proclaiming that a company - who, let's not forget, do not appear to have representatives here to speak on their behalf - is "the enemy" is a good thing to do.
 
It's beyond anyone's control but their (CircuitCo's, not OpenPandora's) own. If anything, NOT cancelling (or better, upgrading) will contribute to speed a bit; you think CircuitCo would listen to OP more if they had some more cash? This thing is worth it beyond doubt. Hang in there!
More cash, more cash? No, I dont think thats the answer. Cuz if I count this right 4000 orders for the first batch at a roughly $300 price is 1.2 million. I am pretty sure that was enough to get parts and have this thing wrapped up by now. Although I understand the man power involve will be slow building units but, this whole Circuit Co. not producing and shipping the boards and holding the project is not not going well with me. That is just ridiculous. Tell me you have the board and its taking time to build and ship them cuz its just the two of you guys doing it, ED and Craigix. Darn it, send me my parts and I will build it myself and save yourself the labor. Darn it darn it darn it.
 
I have no reason to doubt the Pandora project guys being nice people or their good intentions. However, this is a business relation, not a personal one. My deadline is now the end of June (for strong cause reasons, btw) but is becoming plain obvious that I won't get my device by then. So, I might as well just cancel sooner and get the replacement device sooner.
 
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Oh man, things are spiraling lower and lower...they'd better do something (anything), and fast!
 
BTW i agree that the premium pandora was suppose to quickly finish batch 1 since more resources were needed and the funds would go towards that.


But I think premium pandora is funding batch 2 build. apparently there is money to buy parts for batch 2.


We don't get any more updates on the circuit boards which were suppose to be built at 500 a week, I don't even think 500 a month are being built otherwise we would be done. I do think a lot of pandora's are going premium and we are still waiting.
Exactly, Premium Pandora's are annoying as #@%$! I could have gotten my Pandora months ago if it weren't for OP allowing people to cut the line just to help make themselves some extra money... Selfish.
 
Never thought I would go Premium.


Done just that and got my Pandora in a few days.


Well worth the extra money every thing works well n64 amiga all running great


Web is fast enough as well


Very Happy with decision.
 
More cash, more cash? No, I dont think thats the answer. Cuz if I count this right 4000 orders for the first batch at a roughly $300 price is 1.2 million. I am pretty sure that was enough to get parts and have this thing wrapped up by now. Although I understand the man power involve will be slow building units but, this whole Circuit Co. not producing and shipping the boards and holding the project is not not going well with me. That is just ridiculous. Tell me you have the board and its taking time to build and ship them cuz its just the two of you guys doing it, ED and Craigix. Darn it, send me my parts and I will build it myself and save yourself the labor. Darn it darn it darn it.

Well, we already accounted everything, and each first batch unit did cost us approx. 400 USD.


That's approx. 1.6 million, so with those 1.2 million there's a difference of 400.000 USD.


We might be able to send you a PCB and all parts. You really think you can do an OMAP3 PoP yourself?

Oh man, things are spiraling lower and lower...they'd better do something (anything), and fast!

There's not much we can do except for waiting for boards with issues to be fixed and getting boards from CC.


You remember we had issues with a full batch of boards where suddenly WiFi was not working - simply because this was a new, weird issue that we never had before.


CC did test WiFi initialization, but not the connectivity. That's why I built four testing rigs until last Monday and shipped it to them.


They can now test the boards they have (and the few hundred with that issue we sent back) and find out what's wrong.


This WiFi issue surely cost some time. First we needed to realize it's there, then we need to check all boards we have, mark them, collect them, ship them back, improve the testing, send CC new testing rigs, etc.


This is not something that can be done in one or two days. With all the shipping and testing, it means 2 - 3 weeks until everything has arrived and is ready at CircuitCo.


Then they will need to test, find the issue, fix it, retest, etc.


As long as they couldn't test that issue, they didn't send new boards - cause the chances were high a lot of them were broken.


We've arrived at the last about 1000 boards of Batch 1, and once they start with the new testings (next week) and find the fix for the boards we sent back (might be the WiFi module simply needs a reflow), more shipments will happen.


At the same time we're setting up Batch 2. These boards have some optimized layout to prevent such issues with the boards from happening.


We want to start that one as soon as possible, because it should increase the production speed and happen in parallel to the last fixes of the remaining Batch 1 PCBs.

BTW i agree that the premium pandora was suppose to quickly finish batch 1 since more resources were needed and the funds would go towards that.


But I think premium pandora is funding batch 2 build. apparently there is money to buy parts for batch 2.

Yes and no. Batch 2 will probably also be there for the remaining boards of Batch 1 ;)

We don't get any more updates on the circuit boards which were suppose to be built at 500 a week, I don't even think 500 a month are being built otherwise we would be done. I do think a lot of pandora's are going premium and we are still waiting.

500 a week has been overthrown LONG ago. It was 700 PCBs a month.

Exactly, Premium Pandora's are annoying as #@%$! I could have gotten my Pandora months ago if it weren't for OP allowing people to cut the line just to help make themselves some extra money... Selfish.

Probably not.


You've seen that some cancel.


If 300 cancel, this will be 90.000 USD. That money has to come from somewhere.


Even if the parts for the Pandoras belong to us, if there's no money left to pay the current bills, then the company has to file insolvency.


A different person will handle the insolvency and either close down the company or try to save it, it would be out of our hands.


If that happens, I doubt you would see your Pandora nor your money.


For each cancellation, we need a premium to make sure this DOES NOT happen.


I wish it would be for some extra money, 'cause right now, my winning from the Pandora project is -180.000 EUR. And I don't want to know how much it is for Craig, as he got far more preorders than me.


-180.000 EUR sure sounds like we a selfish bunch of people trying to get even more winnings....
 
So the Pandas in the wild need to strut their stuff! Show off your Pandoras, people, get some more premium orders rolling in.
 
Well, we already accounted everything, and each first batch unit did cost us approx. 400 USD.


That's approx. 1.6 million, so with those 1.2 million there's a difference of 400.000 USD.


We might be able to send you a PCB and all parts. You really think you can do an OMAP3 PoP yourself?
Well 1st, at least I'll stop complaining, have somewhat what I paid for and move on with my life. 2nd, how could the cost have been $400 when you guys had spend all the time finding all the cost before and it was a lot less than that. The price of the unit originally was at $299 had all the cost included after months of calculating parts and labor, although by the time I put my ordered in I paid $350. I understood then it was a simple case of exchange rate between currencies. Now this $400 cost of production is completely new. This is beginning to sound like a mechanic shop, always changing the price and threatening not send my unit.
 
And they are not threatening to not send your unit. You should be more concerned about OpenPandora going tits-up than about that happening.
 
Well 1st, at least I'll stop complaining, have somewhat what I paid for and move on with my life. 2nd, how could the cost have been $400 when you guys had spend all the time finding all the cost before and it was a lot less than that. The price of the unit originally was at $299 had all the cost included after months of calculating parts and labor, although by the time I put my ordered in I paid $350. I understood then it was a simple case of exchange rate between currencies. Now this $400 cost of production is completely new. This is beginning to sound like a mechanic shop, always changing the price and threatening not send my unit.

Well, first, we didn't expect the first nubs company to go bust, which cost us 30.000 USD more.


Then we didn't expect the new nubs to fail. 400 units shipping back and forth can easily add up to about 40.000 USD.


We also didn't expect it to take that long until everything is resolved. We've got monthly costs (office rent, debs need to be paid as well, taxes, tax counsellors, etc.). Probably about 8.000 USD per month. Calculate this up to 30 months and you get another 240.000 USD.


While the new nubs were being developed, there were about 8 months where NOTHING happened.


This also lead to many people cancelling, my guess is about 300 - 400 alltogether. That's about another 105.000 USD additional costs.


Development and labour had been paid by our own money, we said from the very beginning only parts and production will be paid by you. But thanks to these issues we have here, we had a lot more expenses that we had planned.


Believe me, we'd rather finish the queue as fast as possible and would NOT have any premium Pandoras at all. But we didn't have much choice, sadly.
 
You might wanna post all this on the blog, ED. If it remains confined to this thread it'll get lost and forgotten about, then the cycle repeats.
 
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Now this $400 cost of production is completely new. This is beginning to sound like a mechanic shop, always changing the price and threatening not send my unit.

I must have missed it, as I've never seen them threaten to not send out units*. They have been pretty transparent about costs and the reason why they needed a cash injection via the increased price. More importantly they haven't forced any of the preorder people to send more money for their units. You are just stuck somewhere in the queue. As I've posted quite a few times already, I've been a batch one and a prem purchaser and I've gotten both my units one at original price and the other at prem price.


* Well I've seen some spats that Craig's gotten into, but they always seem to be you can cancel if you like scenario :p
 
So the Pandas in the wild need to strut their stuff! Show off your Pandoras, people, get some more premium orders rolling in.

I'm doing my best! ... but I'm living amongst a bunch of rural technologically deficient nature lovers. :(


... not that I have anything against nature...


After explaining the Pandora to a girl she said 'So you're an Audio Visual Geek'.


.... No! I'm not even a proper Geek! I'm a wannabe... I hardly know anything and besides - I'm into digital graphics, retro gaming & portable computers... How is that 'Audio Visual'??


"You know what I mean" she says "I like saying 'Audio Visual'... it sounds geeky"


<_<
 
CC have obviously said they could produce the boards to get the business - they are now doing that but obviously they are not very good at testing which is exactly what they should be perfect at!


ED should not have to send testing stations for them - that should be something they just do!


Every board they produce should only be forwarded to OPT if it is perfect. The odd faulty board may slip through


but this all sounds extremely unprofessional by CC.


I cannot believe what CC are doing and not doing it is disgusting and it could all end in tears.


Another board company is needed and fast - surely it's worth doing considering the monthly costs that have to be paid even if nothing is shipped.
 
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