Wands, and Fixtures, New Team Members! Oh my!

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December 4, 2020

Min Read

Hey everybody! As we approach the end of the year, we’re hitting some important milestones and are excited toshare our latest news.

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Shipping Update

We're still targeting Q1 2021 to ship Beta and Kickstarter units. We’re an optimistic and practical bunch, and it's an interesting challenge to look at our milestones, consider the potential sticking points outside of our control where shipping might be delayed (like a pandemic!), and working out an accurate shipping schedule for you all. Hardware preparation for manufacturing and assembly is going as well as can be expected considering the current travel restrictions and extra time needed for shipping and communications. Normally we would have a larger presence onsite at our manufacturers for actively debugging and testing the process for assembling our glasses, wands, and boards, and we’re grateful for the teams we’re working with remotely to get you your headsets as quickly as possible. The software required for manufacturing and quality testing is a major focus for us right now. Our shipping timelines depend on the software (in the form of firmware, but also our software tools that we give to developers) as well as hardware components so it's a delicate dance with our resources and manufacturers.

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Wand Testing

This is a Unity demo utility our resident control wizards Brian and Bob built to help test if the Wand is online and paired to your PC. While testing, the demo utility gives us a report about the Wand’s paired status. This demo utility is an essential testing mechanism that helps us see how the Wand will run smoothly with Unity while we implement the rest of the control schemes. In this demo utility, the Wand is talking directly to the PC through a Nordic dongle. Interestingly, this demo utility is part of the User Interface we’re building for our factory programming and test stations, allowing assembly line operators to test even more quickly and test Wands without needing Tilt Five glasses in the testing loop.

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Wand Fixtures

*The black plastic parts on the mat are the parts for the new "Rocketship" wand test station. The wand in the fixture is an old prototype Wand we had on hand.*

We spent some time designing, iterating, and testing 3D printed Wand fixtures, lovingly called our “Rocketship” fixtures, and prepping them to ship to our manufacturers in China. This small piece plays an important part in the assembly line. There’s an electrical contact on the fixture where batteries would normally go, to power the Wand during testing. Assembly line operators will pop the Wand into the Rocketship fixture to test the joystick and buttons using the Wand Testing software mentioned above.

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Have a safe trip!

Behold! These are the crates we’re sending a ton of stuff to our manufacturers for final assemblies: Wobulator, gproj (Glasses Projector = gproj), NUC computers, mini monitors, stepper motors and controllers, PLA parts, gproj fixtures, IR LED electronics that light up a dot grid pattern used in calibration, FLIR Cameras, acrylic sheets, emergency STOP buttons (important one), PUSH buttons for starting units (we’re using pinball cabinet buttons babyyy), power strips, HDMI and USB cables, soundproofing foam, some IKEA cabinets (might take longer to assemble these than our assembly line ba dum tsss), microphones, packaging material and a partridge in a pear tree.

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Growing the Team

We wouldn’t be here without the amazing support of you, the backers. You believed in our vision before investment resources came into the scene, and it was your trust that has helped us push forward these last many months.

Thank you for celebrating our round of funding with us! This extra boost in resources has allowed us to add some new members to our team to help speed up production and make your TiltFive experience even more amazing.

About Ivy

When I'm not working, I'm a goofball who enjoys bowling and Tequila! (and yeah, I'm the dork who has her own ball, bowling shoes, and rolling bag). My passion is art and cooking. Did I mention, I LOVE FOOD!? My role model and best friend is my Mom. My biggest pet peeve: inconsiderate people. I prefer street smarts over book smarts (if I had to choose). The one thing that helps me overcome any life's challenges has always been my family. All time favorite number since 2nd grade has been 5(main reason why I joined Tilt5) LOL j/k My favorite quote: "There are NO shortcuts to success"

About Joe

Hey I’m Joe, your friendly neighborhood developer relations guy! My first memory playing games was playing Simon, I'm sure I was terrible, and my sister and I grew up on board games like Life, backgammon, Yahtzee and Jumanji. Once I started playing video games on my Sega Genesis there was no turning back. Growing up my mom made me read as many minutes as I wanted to play, sooo I read a TON! When not working you’ll find me cooking or playing Forbidden Sky with my kids. If Kirby were to inhale me in battle, he would have the ability of mediocre hip hop rhymes.

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