In late March, we set out to raise $10,000 on Kickstarter to build a cellular development kit called the Konekt Dash. It's was our first step into the hardware game, as well as our first-ever attempt at crowdsourcing a project.Today, 35 days later, the Konekt Dash Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/konekt/konekt-dash-cellular-dev-kit-free-global-data-plan) came to end with 701 backers who helped us raise $76,170. All we can say to these amazing people, and to all those who helped us spread the word about the Dash is...

We’re absolutely thrilled about the results of this campaign and your generous support is the reason it was such a big success.Thank you. It's been an amazing experience for our team for a lot of different reasons. We've learned so much along the way and we can't wait for what's coming next...

What now?

In May, for those of you who backed us by selecting one of the reward tiers between $5-25, which include our Konekt global SIM cards (pictured below), get ready! We’re on target to meet our May ship date so your rewards will be on their way asap.

A fresh batch of SIMs has arrived! #konekt #SIMs #IoT #M2M #cellular #internetofthings #chicago #startup #grindspace (https://instagram.com/p/2HCYnimHaG/)

A photo posted by Konekt (@konektlabs) on Apr 30, 2015 at 11:57am PDT

The same goes for anyone who chose one of the Maker Kit reward tiers. Your Beaglebone, Raspberry Pi or Arduino kit, and Konekt Global SIMs are on track to ship this month as well.(Our backers who are part of the Raspberry Pi community can use this handy blog post (http://konekt.wpengine.com/blog/raspberry-pi-on-cellular/) to connect their kit to our network!)In June, if you’re one of our beta testers, you can expect the Dash to arrive on your doorstep! We’re extremely excited to get it into your hands, get your feedback and start working alongside you.In August, the Konekt Dash and Dash Pro will ship to the remainder of our backers. We’ll be keeping you in the loop with the progression of the hardware plenty between now and then, but here’s a little update as of today.

Konekt Dash Hardware update from our Electrical Engineer, Daniel D Lindmark

We’re chugging along nicely. One of the true joys of the project is knowing that the design is going to be open-source. I truly believe that readily usable tools that are well documented can have a dramatic impact. There’s really no sense in developing a solution and then letting everyone who uses the tool discover all the headaches again on their own. With that in mind, we’ve been scrubbing our BOM and replacing components that we feel have poor documentation or tools. You can definitely just use the Dash off the shelf, but if you’re making your own design, we want you to be able to troubleshoot and understand why we used the components that we did in the way that we did. I’ll be writing a blog post about the "once and future" battery monitor chip and you’ll see what I’m talking about. The other true joy is hearing from all of you on the Kickstarter. A lot of naysayers say nay on crowdfunding. That it’s a scam, that it’s begging, that it’s a trend, that it’s not reliable, that if the product was good enough it should be done and ready for sale instead of waiting. The simple truth is that it makes so much more sense that we engage with you before we’re done making the Dash. How else were we supposed to know about people’s battery use-cases? How else were we supposed to know about your data usage expectations? There were so many amazing questions on the comments section for this campaign and so many great new businesses that got in contact with us. It wouldn’t have been any good to find this out after we’d sunk all the manufacturing costs into a production run. Because of your feedback we’re reconfiguring the bootloader to store instructions on the secondary MCU in order to lower the data for performing an OTA update (as well as simplify your API). Because you talked about how you need to switch back and forth between firmware revisions, we’re implementing on-board storage so you can switch between programs without needing to re-download.Because you were concerned about security we re-wrote our algorithm for making sure the binary that has been downloaded hasn’t been compromised (All of which we’re excited to blog about in more detail).If I’ve learned anything from reaching out to you, I’ve learned that crowdfunding is one of the most important things to happen to product development. Instead of guessing at features and playing cleanup, we can engage with you early on and help make a product that suits your actual needs instead of whatever was on our whiteboard on day 1. We may be celebrating for successfully meeting our goal, but you should be celebrating for helping shape this tool and making function in the way you need it to.- DD

Keep up to date with the Konekt Dash here on our blog, via Twitter (https://twitter.com/konektlabs), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/konektlabs) or via the Konekt Dash Kickstarter page (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/konekt/konekt-dash-cellular-dev-kit-free-global-data-plan) where we'll continue to post updates on the hardware, shipping, etc.

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