Winter Update
News Feb
Hi OSLOOMERS,
Time for an update:
We have successfully achieved our proof of concept phase for the heddle mechanism and I am now eagerly awaiting for the engineer to finish up the design (in plan form) to build the full loom and start writing the code for it.
I appreciate everybody’s enthusiasm and great responses, but wanted to express that in this stage we wanted to keep the team to a minimum. We did accept folks to help out with the software programming – which we are at about capacity for the alpha. We are looking to do the build in March and hopefully open the project up sometime during the summer. Development is taking a bit longer than expected. Folks that I know and trust are spearheading the alpha loom development. I am confident in their skills and in the completion of the prototyping of version one. We are interested in the development of a successful alpha loom and that is our number one goal.
One of the reasons we are keeping early development under wraps for now is IP infringement – we want to avoid this. There have been cases where development has occurred on what was to be an open hardware project and someone went ahead and patented it. This forced the original creator to go about and have to license his creation from somewhere else. Most open hardware projects have had a healthy prototype developed by a core team (not open to all) – and have achieved a certain stage of development prior to releasing to the public.
Some folks have expressed their desire for the whole design development phase to be open. We stated in our original pitch on kickstarter.com that we were going to develop the prototype and then put out the bill of materials, hardware plans and software out into the world. This is exactly what we are doing. I have had emails from non-pledgers with accusations of its misrepresentation. It came to me as a shock and disbelief but I wondered if there were any of you pledgers that felt this way too. If you feel that the approach of this project does no longer follow the philosophy of your initial pledge, please write me and I will refund your money (you can keep whatever reward). I am not interested in misconstrued thoughts from propagating any further.
Once we get a working model, we hope to expand upon our core group and put in concrete milestones for the future model. At this point the core group of developers will grow with community involvement in time once v.1 of the loom is released.
To those of you that have pledged, again thank you. Those of you that have emailed in support, you have my eternal thanks.
I hope this clarifies some of your concerns.
Cheers
~margarita
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