We are sitting here at Doha airport in Qatar writing our Monday post after a very hectic week visiting Seeedstudio in Shenzhen, China. And it’s been really hectic week, I can honestly say I don’t think any of us has worked this many hours in 7 days in whole our lives. It’s been worth it though, because we did it! We got everything working and ready in time and production is up and running and it’s all on schedule. We have just seen to many kickstarters and pre-order campaigns deliver to late and we do not want to be one of them, and If nothing unexpectedly happens, we will deliver as scheduled.
As we think many of you know of, using internet in China can be a bit difficult. It is often refereed to as the “Great Fire Wall”. We had some clues about it before our visit and tried to take some measures but without much success. We are heavy users of Google services and most of them are either extremely slow or blocked. So is Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and similar social medias so our plan of posting frequent updates failed miserably. Next Monday post we plan on making a summery post of the trip when we organized all photos and when we are a bit more clear in our heads (sleeping on an airplane is not our specialty). Until then here is one photo of us in the Seeedstudio production floor and the new Crazyflie 2.0 box.
Another very interesting thing we have tired to follow (yes Bitcraze website has been blocked by the GTW as well) is the expansion board voting process. We’ve seen now that it has been a bit to easy to manipulate and we will use the following week to figure out what to do about it. You guys are just to clever and we see now that we should have done an investigation of good voting processes before we launched it. Well, it’s been exiting to follow and we are pretty happy to see it got people involved!
Great to hear about the latter part, it’s good you guys care about conducting the vote in a fair manner. If you need any help or tips with getting it secure, drop me a line at the email address attached to this post.
Keep up the good work :)
I’m a Chinese developer. And yes you cannot use google/facebook/YouTube. But you can use VPN :)
And the price in China (taobao/tmall) is even higher than official site.
If you wish develop the chinese market, you should setup a chinese website then we can see the video (now we can’t access YouTube)
Hey, I would realy like to have a Crazyflie 2, but I missed the preorder period. Is there a date, we can expect to be able to buy new ones? Is there any chance to get a Crazyflie 2 of the first charge? Thank you very much =)
Yes, the pre-order is still active but the discount period has ended. There are still units available from the first batch and they are estimated to start shipping from the 8th of December.
I, for one, am very excited to finally see the fruits of all your hard work. I’m really looking forward to the arrival of the Crazyflie 2.0 since I’ve loved the original so much!
As for the “Great Firewall,” I was quarantined in China for a week (during the “swine flu pandemic” in 2009) and I can say that having a reverse SSH tunnel to my server back home in USA made all the difference in getting through the firewall. I was able to pipe in and out whatever I wanted without restriction. If you’re ever stuck in China again, I suggest it as a poor-man’s VPN solution.