Compute Blade: Your rack-mountable ARM cluster

Last week of the Kickstarter
about 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
about 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

We did it!
about 3 years ago – Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 07:21:46 AM

We did it! We’ve raised enough to make it happen! Thank you so much for being a part of it! It has been incredible seeing the response from you all, and I am so happy with how well it has been received by this amazing community!
 

  I have a few very important updates about the Kickstarter campaign, which unfortunately were not seen in time before the launch. I am really sorry if any of these changes affect you.

•  [10" BladeRunner (3D Printed)] The 10” Rack Cluster description was wrong. This setup includes 5 Fans and 5 Fan Units, not 2, as it says in the description.
   
• [Build your own Cluster] Unfortunately, the Kickstarter page included some meta information that was not related to the Heat Sinks themselves. Please be aware that if you have included any of the Heat Sink add-ons, it only includes the Heat Sinks themselves. Sorry.
   
• [+ $0 Shipping] The $0 shipping was to indicate that the shipping cost for the add-on will be included later, and you will get this information after the campaign, but it does look confusing in hindsight. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really any other way to indicate this. I will try my hardest to make sure the shipping is as reasonable as possible on your items, but just so you are aware that this information will be added later.
   

Please, as always, do join us on our Discord server, if you haven’t already, and get involved in the conversations!

Thank you so much!

Yours truly,

Ivan