Hey everyone!

It is time for another update.

tldr;

• We hand-folded thousands of boxes for the Glasgows and Aluminium Cases
• Designed and printed a lot of product labels
• We hand bundled hundreds of cables to go with the Glasgows
• Packed up the early bird Glasgows to go to Mouser
• The first batch of 1000 Glasgow Aluminium cases are on the way to us from the manufacturer!

Bundled Glasgow cables

One of many large boxes full of small Glasgow boxes.

Packing Materials

Something that does not get much attention is all the "little" stuff that needs to be taken care of to fulfill a campaign with physical items in it. Over the last few weeks and months we have ordered thousands of card board boxes and hand folded them. This is no small task considering the quantity.

Piotr also spent some time writing a software to allow our Zebra printers to print product labels. The datamatrix barcodes are a relatively new requirement from vendors like Mouser. This barcode includes information about the Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) essentially the product ID, and a bunch of other useful info like the production date and revision of the hardware.

Video showing the Zebra printer generate product labels

Yes we know, revC for Glasgow should have been "varC" for variant instead, but that is too late to change. The revision on the label is related to the manufacturing related revisions of the hardware that should have no impact on the user.

Cases

We have received the final prototypes of the aluminium Cases.

Glasgow Aluminium Case final Prototype

The cases finally look great and we were not able to find a flaw in them so far… so we pulled the trigger and ordered a batch of 1000. It took a while for them to be produced, but they are now on the way to us and should be here in a week or so. After we receive the cases we will inspect them, pack them in the small boxes we prepared & labeled, and finally ship them out to Mouser. If they pass inspection to our satisfaction, we will place another order for a batch of 1000 more cases.

Glasgow Cases at our manufacturer before shipment

Glasgow Aluminium Cases packed in a box ready to ship from the manufacturer to us (1000 cases coming in 5 very heavy boxes)

Software

If you are monitoring the #glasgow IRC, Discord or Matrix channels you might have seen that work has resumed. Catherine (Whitequark) was dealing with a lot of things, global and personal, over the last few years but she is back now! There is a lot of infrastructure work that has been done and still needs to be done so that you get a good experience when you get your Glasgow.

As a part of the last month’s work, we now have a revamped, and much simpler, installation flow for the Glasgow software on Linux, Windows, and macOS. It doesn’t ever require a native toolchain anymore—just a Python interpreter. This work has been enabled by another of Catherine’s projects, YoWASP.

If you would like to support the software effort please consider supporting Catherine through Patreon!

Timeline

As you have seen, we have updated the shipping dates on Crowd Supply. These are still estimates, we will feel confident about things when they actually ship. :D That said, we will get the Early Bird Glasgows and Cases to Mouser before the end of August. As we will be getting 1000 cases, this means that there will be an excess of cases at Mouser to fulfill early-bird orders. We will then get into a regular cadence of shipping more Glasgows to Mouser every month until we fulfill the campaign. Depending on how well the manufacturing will go, this might take more or less time. This is why we have currently set the regular Glasgow shipping date to February 2024.

Closing words

This is it for now, we hope that by the time the next update goes out some of you will already have received your Glasgows and cases!

If you have any questions getting started, please join our Discord server and ask away.

See you in the next update!

Cheers,
Piotr Esden-Tempski and the Glasgow team