Thanks to everyone’s help we reached an important milestone yesterday evening: USD $50,000 from over 500 pledges. We’re delighted to have so many people believe in what we’re doing. We’re getting ever closer to making the EOMA68 project a hardware reality and still have four weeks to go.

In an earlier update about minimum order quantities (MOQs), we explained that the actual threshold for bringing this hardware to life isn’t a set dollar amount per se, but rather a fixed minimum number of units pledged for. In particular, this campaign’s critical threshold is 250 computer card assemblies, which includes the mid-mount USB-OTG and HDMI sockets and the PCMCIA casework that go into every Computer Card, be it a Libre Tea or Pass-through Computer Card.

Of course, a strict MOQ threshold doesn’t always map nicely to a strict dollar threshold, especially when offering multiple products across a wide range of pricing. For example, the Pass-through Computer Card ($35) and the Completely Assembled Laptop + Computer Card ($1,200) both count as a single Computer Card toward the 250-unit threshold, but obviously count toward the dollar threshold in very unequal ways.

So, we find ourselves in a situation in which we are 85% of the way to our MOQ threshold (213 of 250 Computer Cards pledged for), but only 33% to our dollar threshold (\$50k of \$150k raised). This disparity exists because we couldn’t perfectly predict the ratios of different products for which you would pledge - basically, we were being conservative and assuming more $1,200 would be pledged for. Of course, it’s great that we’re much closer to our actual MOQ goal than we’d anticipated and the further we go beyond that goal, the better the chances of carrying extra stock, expanding the product line, and generally becoming a self-sustaining business. In the meantime, we’re working on ways to reconcile the difference between our MOQ goal and our dollar goal and will keep you informed.