Yeah, so it's been 2 months since the last update post here, but if you're subscribed to the store newsletter, you should've been kept up to date already. If you're not subscribed, sign up here: https://news.keeb.io/ Things have been quite busy at the store and for me personally, but I wanted to give you an update on some awesome things.

Spotted in the Wild!

Okay, I'm going to skip this temporarily since I haven't been on Reddit, etc. so much. Maybe next time.

Updates

  • Cepstrum - It's been released! Have you gotten yours yet? Why not?!
  • FoldKB - Also released, get them before I have to reorder them again
  • Stampy - You guessed it, it's available for sale too
  • Sinc - If you haven't figured out the pattern yet, the Rev. 4 has now been released today!
  • Nyquist - The release streak is broken - The Rev. 4 PCBs just arrived today, and we'll be QC'ing the PCBs and flashing them next week. We should have them ready for sale by the middle of the week
  • Iris Choc Board - Haven't touched the design for this one in a while, hoping to get back to it next week
  • Chocopad Rev. 2 - The Chocopad is making a comeback with a Rev. 2 that has the microcontroller and fancy RGB LEDs on-board. Should be available within the next 1-2 weeks

Shipping Woes

The Round 3 of the Iris Aluminum Case ran into a major issue during shipping. I'll give a full rundown in a future blogpost when all the dust settles, but here's a quick summary of the story.

At the end of April, the manufacturer shipped out 12 boxes of aluminum cases via sea freight, since shipping everything via air would've have been quite expensive. The ship finally arrived at the end of May, and then the boxes started their trip from CA (California) to us in NC (North Carolina) at the beginning of June.

Almost all of the boxes had arrived at the local UPS warehouse around June 8. But then they just sat there and the tracking number didn't update.

So I sent in a message asking what happened, and customer service said something like, "the tracking numbers were found to be counterfeit, so we're sending all your boxes to the overgoods/fraud warehouse in Salt Lake City, UT." The warehouse is this big place where eventually, the packages get auctioned off.

Well crap...

My team contacted a bunch of UPS people, and in the end, the result is that the 3rd-party shipping agent the manufacturer used needed to contact the UPS fraud team to clear up the issue. I also asked UPS if I could just pay for the shipping cost, and they said no, you can't do that.

After a few days of waiting for the shipping agent to do something, my manufacturer told me that the shipping agent refuses to be responsible for the issue because they did indeed use an illegal UPS account. But, the good news is that the manufacturer will remake the cases at their cost and will sue the shipping agent.

In the meantime, one of the boxes randomly ended up at my office one day. It had gone back and forth between NC and UT a couple of times, but fortunately, we received it. In the box were 9 of the Dark Gray aluminum cases. We've prepared them for sale and are about to release them, but there's been an interesting development this week where we might actually be receiving a 2nd box.

Stay tuned for the next installment of the Iris Aluminum Case shipping saga!

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