I see you have been building some for the Ocean Institute, so good to see you have demand, and perhaps a queue is forming :-)
I see the kits are marked as "pre-order", what is your anticipated lead times for shipping on new orders? Di you foresee a point when they become ex-stock or with a known lead time?
Obviously 3-D printing is one area you almost full control over but for components like the controllers etc are you holding stock or are you dependent on supplier availability and those being delivered to you first? Likewise RPi's, which in some areas are in short supply, and if so, and thinking forward regarding replacements can RPi 4's be used? Noting of course manufacturer production horizons, I think RPi 3's are due to still be produced for several years but in some areas I can get 4's easier than 3's.
Hi Costas,
Thanks for a detailed and open answer, much appreciated. I now understand what the "pre-order" flag means, I thought it meant some development or other activity was still being performed and "production" had not started, so that is not the case. Cool. May be we'll be in a position to take another ROV with us on our tour round Europe next year.
With ROV's shipping hopefully some of the recipients will post when they have delivery of their Mod C's and share details on what they are doing with them - I miss the old openexplorer.com site and finding out what the world community is doing with ROV exploration. Your dedication in making a new open source low cost ROV available is much welcomed.
Best, Paul
Hey Paul, thanks for another great question!
I'm incredibly excited to finally see some demand after working on this company for so long. Right now, the lead time for a kit to ship is about 4 weeks. You actually can order a Model C ROV right now, we're just flying the Pre-order flag so buyers know that it'll take a bit of extra time to ship. The reason for this is that we're still a small company, and we don't have much room for inventory. As such, we have to wait a few days for hardware to ship as it's needed, and we say 4 weeks to give ourselves extra time to account for any shipping delays that are out of our control.
Luckily, we made sure to source all the controllers/processors/computers in our ROV kits to ensure we don't have any supply problems. We've only needed to hold a small amount of stock in-house. But with the first ROV's heading out (one as far as the Mediterranean), I'm getting the impression we'll have to find a way to hold more very soon...
As far as the Pi's go, we've enjoyed pretty easy access to the RPi 3B's. We plan to stick with those models for now, because the ROV's internal electronics cradle is built to hold that specific model, and we've actually found access to Pi 3's to be a bit more reliable. As soon as we find a way to run and produce our subs more efficiently with a Pi4, you can bet we'll switch over.
For users planning to upgrade their ROV's to a Pi 4, I'm sure there's a straightforward way to do this. I don't have the specs for the Pi4, but I've seen photos and it seems to me that they might actually fit on the original cradle. If they don't, we'll probably release a cradle upgrade that can accommodate a Pi4.
I hope this answers some of your questions, and keep 'em coming!
-Costas