News on Crawler?

Hi everyone,

Since it's been a while since there's been any news about the crawler, thought I might raise it here. It's been rumored for a while, but just curious when we might be able to get our hands on it! Looks like a fantastic system from everything I've seen.

Thanks!

Eric

Eric,
the last clue I saw was that Ted and company were not happy with what they had come up with to date and were taking two steps back and regrouping on the powered indexer.

Also, I believe all their time and effort is going into 2.0 unless they have enough engineers to work both as separate paths.

Hopefully, Ted or one of the other staff will give us an update on all things Handibot soon. I know it is killing me.

BTW, if you don't already, follow the blog, there have been several updates there that didn't get announced here.

Eric,

What Mark said is correct--we've been devoting the majority of our efforts to the handibot 2 for last few months (and the last year really). Ted has been working on a new idea for the crawler that will be easier to use--but recently he's switched to doing some heavy lifting on FabMo (the motion control and interface that will ship with new handibots).

The design for the handibot 2 has finally been frozen and parts have been ordered from our vendors. For the last few months I've been working out the little details like wire routing and dust collection--things that absolutely have to work but often get overlooked until the last minute. I've also been working to improve our production process to keep our current products moving out the door and to set us up for growth if this new handibot starts to take off quickly. If I've been less visible on the blog and forum it is mainly because I don't have too many exciting things to report on at the moment (I put all the good stuff up as soon as the first prototype was made for maker faire way back in May!). I do find a lot of the design minutia very interesting and I'd like to share more on that once we've actually got this thing up for sale.

Anthony has come on board (you'll be seeing more regular blog posts from him) and he has some good ideas for accessories that may come online sooner with his help. All in all I've felt really good about the last few months of work at Handibot and I appreciate the patience of all the users that are eagerly awaiting our new products. I'd be happy to answer any questions on the forum about what we're currently working on, or the status of a particular project.