Things progressing well here, assembly process well on its way, shippings estimated to start on 1st of March. All details seem to be working nicely, and the new unit with final specifications has been in hardcore testing and has worked flawlessly without any obvious bugs.
Haptics really improved the user experience, this feature was very much welcomed by my tester who had used the 10 month old prototype now all this time.
The new partner company manufacturing the wooden parts has been really good choice, their quality seems very nice with finish and the material, and they seem to really appreciate the design and wish to make beautiful parts for us. The only negative side is the price of wooden parts, that doubled from original plans and naturally affect the pricing opportunities of the Apollo, but at least the most important things are there now, quality and production capacity and reliability.
Now I have both, the compact default glass tube of 80mm, and the 140mm one, which according to real life testing is very comfortable to use at home (vapor cooler and visible to the eye nicely), and as the new design makes it very easy to swap the tube in 2 seconds, I would think this is something most people would like to have with the Apollo, both tubes.
I decided after all leave the temp sensor out, since the only advantage it really had was in a situation when the vape is hot already due to a previous session, and someone turns it on again which is a minor thing and the warm up can be stopped anyway manually when it's ready in these situations, and the visibility of vapor formation helps in this. And as this original way of control has worked so well, and is very robust without any surprises, I want to start like this. So this is the only thing where I had to come a little bit back from my original plans.
The laser engravings on the Apollo are placed on top of the wood where touch panel is, to show the places of buttons and the Apollo logo. And also I like it very much, as it looks quite classy on the stainless steel heat shield which is visible after the removal of herb chamber, there is the Apollo logo with small made in Finland text and the serial number will be added there too in extremely small sized numbers.
it's barely visible in this photo but those lines showing the button places are actually shaped like little "vapor clouds"
sorry for the lack of images of the final product, due to the tight timetable, I didn't get photos yet and the unit I had went already to this tester I wrote about, he is already writing and filming article and video to be published in a local herbal club website here next week! All I can show here are some computer renderings without all the details:
But to sum it all up, we are almost ready to ship out, assembly of the first batch is on its way already, and everything seems to work very nicely.
Also now I have added paypal standard payments option to my webshop, so that ordering is possible with paypal and also it can be used to pay with a credit card, this should make it easier to order outside of Finland.
Also I have got a good deal with the German courier company DHL, so that once the units are ready, any packages sent within EU will be delivered in 24 hours from door to door with a very reasonable shipping price (actually lower than regular mail parcels here!). Naturally I will ship outside EU too, but it takes probably a couple of days to get delivered. I still need to figure out how to make my website to exclude the 24% of VAT from orders outside EU. If anyone has experence on how to do this on OpenCart platform, please help. The price of Apollo package within EU is 279 eur, which would make it $249 to the rest of the world.
So here is a little update of the situation, I'll now continue working!
Haptics really improved the user experience, this feature was very much welcomed by my tester who had used the 10 month old prototype now all this time.
The new partner company manufacturing the wooden parts has been really good choice, their quality seems very nice with finish and the material, and they seem to really appreciate the design and wish to make beautiful parts for us. The only negative side is the price of wooden parts, that doubled from original plans and naturally affect the pricing opportunities of the Apollo, but at least the most important things are there now, quality and production capacity and reliability.
Now I have both, the compact default glass tube of 80mm, and the 140mm one, which according to real life testing is very comfortable to use at home (vapor cooler and visible to the eye nicely), and as the new design makes it very easy to swap the tube in 2 seconds, I would think this is something most people would like to have with the Apollo, both tubes.
I decided after all leave the temp sensor out, since the only advantage it really had was in a situation when the vape is hot already due to a previous session, and someone turns it on again which is a minor thing and the warm up can be stopped anyway manually when it's ready in these situations, and the visibility of vapor formation helps in this. And as this original way of control has worked so well, and is very robust without any surprises, I want to start like this. So this is the only thing where I had to come a little bit back from my original plans.
The laser engravings on the Apollo are placed on top of the wood where touch panel is, to show the places of buttons and the Apollo logo. And also I like it very much, as it looks quite classy on the stainless steel heat shield which is visible after the removal of herb chamber, there is the Apollo logo with small made in Finland text and the serial number will be added there too in extremely small sized numbers.
it's barely visible in this photo but those lines showing the button places are actually shaped like little "vapor clouds"
sorry for the lack of images of the final product, due to the tight timetable, I didn't get photos yet and the unit I had went already to this tester I wrote about, he is already writing and filming article and video to be published in a local herbal club website here next week! All I can show here are some computer renderings without all the details:
But to sum it all up, we are almost ready to ship out, assembly of the first batch is on its way already, and everything seems to work very nicely.
Also now I have added paypal standard payments option to my webshop, so that ordering is possible with paypal and also it can be used to pay with a credit card, this should make it easier to order outside of Finland.
Also I have got a good deal with the German courier company DHL, so that once the units are ready, any packages sent within EU will be delivered in 24 hours from door to door with a very reasonable shipping price (actually lower than regular mail parcels here!). Naturally I will ship outside EU too, but it takes probably a couple of days to get delivered. I still need to figure out how to make my website to exclude the 24% of VAT from orders outside EU. If anyone has experence on how to do this on OpenCart platform, please help. The price of Apollo package within EU is 279 eur, which would make it $249 to the rest of the world.
So here is a little update of the situation, I'll now continue working!
)
