Compute Blade: Your rack-mountable ARM cluster

Almost there
about 3 years ago – Wed, May 24, 2023 at 09:38:09 AM

Dear backers,

We are thrilled to inform you that we are just one step away from shipping the first Uptime Lab Team Clusters to you! The development process has been an exciting journey, and we appreciate your patience and support throughout.

Today, at 8 PM CEST, we will be sending out the backerkit survey to all of our backers. This survey is crucial in gathering the necessary information from you to ensure a smooth shipping process. We kindly request that you carefully fill out the survey and provide accurate responses. Your cooperation will greatly assist us in pushing the project forward in the right direction. Once we have gathered all the necessary information from each of you, we can begin preparing for shipping.

While we have encountered a few challenges along the way, such as issues with the 100-pin connector upgrade and unexpected delays in the delivery times of this new component, we have resolved these matters. The final assembly step is now ready to commence, and once the boards have undergone thorough testing, they will be promptly packed and shipped out to you in batches.

We have production and shipping facilities located within the European Union and the United States. This allows us to efficiently cater to backers from both regions.

We are grateful for your continued support and enthusiasm for the Compute Blade project. Your feedback and participation have been invaluable to us. We are confident that the end result will meet and exceed your expectations.

Thank you again for being a part of this exciting journey with us. We look forward to delivering the Blades to your doorstep soon!

We'd love to see you on Discord and hear your feedback about the survey in the #backerkit-survey channel there

Uptime Industries team

Good, bad, necessary
over 3 years ago – Tue, May 02, 2023 at 01:57:34 PM

Good news, everyone! 

And it is actually good news! The CM4s with 8GB RAM have just arrived! So everyone who ordered the Uptime Lab Team Cluster will soon be proud owners of this rare (some would say mythical) hardware. 

Ok, now you have had the good news I’ll mix in some less good news… Because of my last-minute decision to replace 100-pin connectors on Compute Blade v.1, we ran into a few difficulties – Sorry for my poor decisions.

Basically, the connector is now 1.5mm higher, and because of this, the current temperature profiles of the soldering don’t work correctly with the Blade form factor. You are probably wondering why I would do such a thing – as I often wonder to myself – but there was method to my madness. It would protect us from any future changes to the CM4 components arrangement, and as an added bonus, potentially allow us to swop out the CM4 for different Raspberry Pi clones (if you so wished, or if you cant get your hands on a CM4 because you didn't go for the Uptime Lab Team Cluster option... not just me today regretting my decisions today). I will clarify that this is because of the location of the TMP chip directly under the CM4, I placed it, taking into account the components on the Raspberry Pi. Now the components on the compute module won't obstruct even if they are right above the TMP chip. Anyway, we are back on track with it as we were able to switch to a supplier with some super-advanced equipment and everything is looking great. The only issue though is it has added a 3-week delay to the order – I am really honestly very sorry about that.

On the topic of bad news, we also ran into a few issues getting the money out of Kickstarter. This is because the Kickstarter is in euros, the company is in the US, I am in Germany, and the suppliers are scattered around the world. Little things like that. It looks like it should all still be fine and on schedule, but if I compare it to my schedule it put us back about a month.

Ok, let’s get back to some good news again! We managed to update the "Powered by Raspberry Pi" logo on the Blades to the latest one. We’ll take that as a win! Also, all the components are now in production or are already finished! And, best of all, there haven't been any issues with them at all.

Finally, the last thing to mention in this update is that the final survey will be released later this week.

As always I look forward to seeing you all in our Discord!

Thanks a lot!

Ivan

TLDR; everything is awesome and going to plan!
over 3 years ago – Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 09:55:07 AM

Hi everyone!

Again I am really sorry I have been a bit quiet, I’ve been trying to reply to everyone individually – so if you still haven't yet had a response, hold tight, it is coming. The first batch of Blades is in production, which will go into the Uptime team cluster for testing, demonstrating, and making sure what you will get will be awesome.  Perhaps the timing of the shipment will move a little bit because of the paperwork. I'll keep you posted.

As some of you know from our Discord, we are working on the design of our t-shirt for all our Kickstarter backers. I don’t want to say that these t-shirts will be the best damn t-shirts you’ll ever have… but these t-shirts are going to be the best damn t-shirts you’ll ever have. Thanks to everyone who gave us ideas. 

Kickstarter is pretty much done now with the payment process. There are some people who had problems paying through Kickstarter for various reasons, and unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anything we can do to resolve them on the Kickstarter side. We’re going to check with BackerKit, which is a partner we’ve been working with, to see if there is any other way to resolve the issues… so if you are having issues just know we are working on it.

On a really positive note, we are now a registered company in the US, trading under Uptime Industries Inc… yes… you got it :))) if not here is a clue: There was an idea, to bring together a group of remarkable people, to see if we could become something more. So when they needed us, we could make the technologies that they never could. What this means for you, on top of us creating a new superhero team, is that we’ll be able to provide correct invoices for everyone who bought Blades for their business. We also have added a production site for the Blades in the US, this should help with distribution too as a huge majority of backers are located there. Unfortunately, we only had one backer from Trinidad and Tobago, although that is really awesome we’re probably going to wait a little while before we add production there. All in all, we have backers from 50 different countries, which we couldn’t be more excited about!

I guess that is it for today, don’t be a stranger come and join our Discord channel! 

Last week of the Kickstarter
over 3 years ago – Tue, Apr 04, 2023 at 08:41:25 AM

This is it! It’s the final week of the Kickstarter! The absolute last chance to see how far this goes. It is my first ever experience of anything like this, so we chose 60 days, which, it turns out, no one recommends doing, so it has been a little quiet a month :)

But there was actually a reason for this…

It gave us a chance to see the real demand for Compute Blade and we’ve received an absolute boatload of feedback (so much so that I’m not even able to respond to everyone. I’m really sorry if you are one of the people waiting on a response). Perhaps most importantly, the time has given our manufacturers and potentially big customers a chance to see the campaign. Oh, and potential competitors, too, of course (hi guys!).

Compute Blade is right now going through the CE and FCC certification. Everything should be fine, but keep your fingers crossed just in case :) I really hope to share the details of this process on my social media when I have updates.

We also have some big news for you as we come up to the end of the campaign. Despite not reaching the stretch goal target, we’ve begun work on a limited quantity of the Ai module, which we’re making available in the add-ons later this week – I'll let you know on Twitter and Discord. We’ve set the price at $170 and we’ll be able to ship them in November this year. It will be a limited test batch of 200 units, and because of that, the price is what it is, but even so, it is comparable to two coral USB sticks if you were to buy them separately. We’re also adding a limited number of the Smart Fan Units you asked for as add-ons. And yes, this device will essentially add another Raspberry Pi to your cluster, the RP2040.

Practice has shown that advertising doesn’t really work for such a complex project, so we stopped it. We’ve been considering whether to try to enable it again for the last week and think we probably will. A couple of reviews are also in the pipeline, so look out for those!

Once again, I’d like to invite you to our Discord server. Participants are already experimenting and sharing their experiences with their Compute Blade RC2, which they got before Kickstarter. They're even already making enclosures. Come and check it out!

And one last thing…

We've updated the graphics on the Kickstarter Blades under CM4; now, every Kickstarter Blade will have this exclusive dystopian image.

The first milestone
over 3 years ago – Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 09:21:18 AM

Hi Blade Backers,

“Remember to celebrate milestones as you prepare for the road ahead” – Nelson Mandela

Well, we just reached our first milestone! $750k! If you are looking at the page in Europe, you might be seeing the number in euros… because I forgot to set which currency we are basing the milestones off properly… because who knew that different countries see different currencies? 

Anyway. Now you will get the latches thrown in with the Blades for free. Please note that this only applies if you added the latch as an add-on item. Feel free to edit your pledge and remove it from the add-on (and maybe add an enclosure or more Blades too?)

For example, this is what a 10-blade enclosure looks like in the current iteration, in case you missed:

And be sure to join our Discord community, where I share the latest Compute Blade stuff.

Today, I showed en enclosure prototype for installing a Compute Blade with an FPGA module.

Live long and prosper 🖖

Yours truly,

Ivan