September 27th 2018 Update: Over 100 Vidiots were shipped in the last week, and we are continuing to build and ship through until everyone’s orders are out there. If you’re waiting on a Visual Cortex backorders, those are in assembly now as well.
August 22nd 2018 Update: Last Thursday we received our Vidiot assemblies and it’s been a frenzy of activity over here. We have a batch of 96 units we’re shooting to have in the mail before Knobcon, with the remainder of our backorders shipped later in September. Passage and Bridge restocks are nearly complete and we’re endeavoring to tie up all our other production loose ends before Knobcon. Visual Cortex assemblies should be shipping to us soon.
August 8th 2018 Update: It was a bit later than we were told, but we got word that our Vidiot assemblies have shipped today, so next week we should be able to finally resume shipments. We’re anxious and ready to get all backorders fulfilled as soon as they arrive! Passage and Bridge restock runs are getting panels and knobs this week and should all be added to stock soon.
July 27th 2018 Update: In the past week, Passage & Bridge SMT are complete and backorders began shipping, a few Vidiots shipped, funds were wired for Visual Cortex PCB assemblies at our contractor, Andor 1 basic units added to stock, and we got word Vidiot assemblies are shipping to us the first of the upcoming week. We will hopefully receive them the end of next week and then Vidiots will begin flooding out the gates the first and second weeks of August.
Originally Posted July 20th 2018: It’s busy days for us here at the LZX workshop, and we’re scrambling to keep up with production and development spread in many directions. We build niche products in very small batches by most electronics manufacturer’s terms, so when many items are out of stock at once it can bog us down for months. Couple this with our decision to transition into managing our own manufacturing and distribution in house again back in April of this year, and it’s been intense to say the least – and at times impossible to successfully gauge the fulfillment time table. It’s important that you know we haven’t forgotten any orders, and that we are working around the clock to get caught up.
We are a team of three and a quarter full time video freaks, not a large company with different departments or vast resources. We like being a small community focused shop that can focus on the specific needs of our niche customer base, and hope to stay that way. Unfortunately that means being along for the ride with us sometimes when production doesn’t go as smoothly as expected or a vast number of projects are on the table at once (currently, both of these cases are true.)
If you’re getting impatient. Please remember that we’ll gladly substitute anything we currently have in stock for what you ordered if you’d like something different. Since June 1st, we’ve ceased accepting back orders on any products we do not have in the building ready to ship, unless it is a large order from a retailer that would otherwise help push the project into production. This policy is helping us get caught up faster.
This is where we are with production as of July 20th, 2018. Please do not expect day-by-day updates to this thread, we’re too busy building stuff! We’ll try to post these updates monthly, or weekly if there’s a lot of news. This is an attempt to communicate proactively with anyone who is waiting on these items in order to reduce the amount of e-mail we get inquiring about the status of orders.
In Progress
These units are in various stages of assembly in our workshop and are expected to be either shipped to waiting backorder customers or added to our stock on the website in the near future.
- 40x Andor 1 Basic (Black), all parts here just need to package them
- 25x Andor 1 Deluxe (Black & Ivory), same as above
- 20x Doorway, SMT is running next week, second half of a batch from last month
- 40x Staircase, SMT and through hole assembly complete, waiting testing and packaging
- 100x Passage, some units in thru hole assembly, some SMT assemblies still in review
- 100x Bridge, first half of the SMT assemblies ran today, currently being inspected
- 100x Vidiot, these are the units we have left from an assembly batch of 100 that didn’t go as well as we’d have liked as an in house job due to the complexity of the mainboard assembly. Since we aren’t shipping any that don’t meet up to our expectations of quality, we’ve ordered and paid for an additional 200x assemblies from a third party company. While we wait for those, we’re working through the units we built in house and testing/shipping them, it’s just very slow going – even with some extra hired hands over the past few weeks.
Vidiot assemblies in review
Waiting On Subcontracted Assembly
We have all the parts to finish these items in our workshop, but are waiting on a third party assembly company to finish their work and deliver sub-assemblies.
- 200x Vidiot, expecting mainboard sub-assemblies to arrive in ~2 weeks, then we will mate them with rear assemblies we have waiting in house. This means we expect to have all our Vidiot orders out the door in the first half of August.
Fresh SMT assemblies for Passage and Bridge
Ready And Waiting
These production runs are currently waiting for a spot in the schedule, but are otherwise ready to go in terms of special and long lead time items such as frontpanels and through hole components. We plan to contract SMT assemblies for these units as soon as we can, but may have to space them out in series due to being stretched so thin in terms of production funding right now. Hopefully we can move a good nubmer of these to “in progress” before the end of the month. Listed here in order of production priorities:
- 100-200x Prismatic Ray
- 50-100x Shapechanger
- 50-100x Visual Cortex
- 50-100x Navigator
- 50-100x Curtain
- 50-100x Sensory Translator
Carts loaded with through hole components and Vidiot assemblies
Pre-Production
Your preorders for Orion series modules have been going directly into components purchasing for Memory Palace, Escher Sketch, Diver and TBC2. We had 2500 sliders and slider caps that came in this week, as well as all our switches and illuminated pushbuttons. It’s been exciting to see all the parts start arriving, and to be putting some time into finishing the project in general. We plan to begin assembly some time in September.
Thank you very much for your continuing support of the work we do here at LZX. You are an essential part of our team and are appreciated by each of us here on a personal level.
Lars