stonewolf
USA
Asked
— Edited
I am asking this question, because I think a lot of us are wanting to know when we might be getting our preorders, I know some are supposed to ship from Canada next week, but what about the ones coming from China, I thought this time in March things were supposed to start shipping?
Many of us are looking to get are first robots up and running, not doing any good just drawing dust :-{
I might be able to get others interested in robots, but I have to have an alive one to show people what can be built.
I myself will wait another 2 or 3 months, I have nothing to loose, but after that, enough is enough, you can talk all you want and show me videos, but I want something real in my hands that I can use.
Yeah there is all this preorder talk about people waiting a whole year to get things from other places, I understand that, but I just never order things that far ahead, I have had some of the newest things at times when they first came out, I ended up being a test person, would rather wait until the bugs are worked out, before I spend big bucks on a what if?
Hopefully waiting all this extra time, there will be no glitches or bugs or problems, things should be worked out.
I tell people I am building a robot, but if it's just a shell and doesn't move or anything, it's just a robot shell and me talking :-{
http://www.ez-robot.com/Community/Forum/posts.aspx?threadId=5444
Reading it back again, I hope my earlier post hasn't come across too negatively I just felt it needed saying after the unexpected surprise of an additional 3 month wait was dropped on us. At this stage I have all answers I need, I just wanted to stress how important total honesty and transparency is at this stage, after these delays. If you give us that then I'm happy and I assume most of the community will be too
Now do you see how frustrating it has been? Especially when I feel sucked in by a stated 5-7 week delivery time - which even after telling you to be above board over a month ago (to avoid others feeling misled like I do) in correcting the dates in the shop, it still shows 5-7 weeks.
The real kick in the teeth was the statement that if people didn't like it they could always cancel. After this long I think most people will stick it out but I felt that I owed it to you to tell you that from a customer experience perspective, for me personally it has been a really rough ride and a bad one. I lost count of the number of times that I was told "this week" for the STLs - which I understand fully the problems you had now, but why not have said that at the time? The eyes for JD - DJ months back said to me "I don't know why they're not in the shop yet - they should be let me check" (or similar) - they weren't even finished at that stage and he would have known this so why not be clear ?
I honestly feel as though I was sucked in and strung along guys sorry. The product will be awesome I'm sure, but for those that don't have V3 boards to keep them going there is nothing to do and it's very frustrating when the promised 5-7 lead will actually end up as months and not weeks.
For you guys that have ordered way before me it must be really frustrating and I can only imagine how much you are dying to get your hands on the product - my heart goes out to you and I genuinely hope your deliveries in particular come really soon to you.
I've personally ended up placing an order with another robotics company just to keep my tinkering mind busy as I wait - I would rather have increased my EZ order by $500 which is what I wanted to do, but I didn't have enough confidence at the time and still can't even place the order for JD's eyes - you could have sorted that by now guys - all you have to do is load the item in the shop so we could ask you to add it to our orders. You don't have to ship it yet you only have to allow us to make our orders complete so that when we do end up getting shipments, we don't had to wait another however long to get the bits you hadn't listed.
Seeing that I live on the opposite side of the globe I did some research:
Technically Summer is the start of June to end of August
Officially in Canada Summer is June 21 to September 21
I received an email from Ez-Robot on 20 September 2013 first announcing that the "Revolution is here" and listing prices of the EZ robots & kits, etc
Does this mean that only people who ordered within the first two days of getting this email will get their kits?
Another clue would be DJ's statement on 17 Mar under the discussion Just A Thought On The V4 - "The few hundred that we are getting manufactured in Canada for the pre-orders...."
I think a better way of announcing this surprise delivery of pre-orders should have been "those who pre-ordered EZ-Bs or Development kits with order numbers up to 9-?" or even email the lucky people
As it is now, people are yet again wondering, guessing, hoping, etc etc which is causing so much frustration.
From a Dr Who episode, just in case there aren't any Dr Who fans. (*GASP* I shudder the thought!)
{K.C.C.O.}
There were also some intermittent delays in V3 order fulfillment (not this long, but I waited a month plus international shipping time for my V3 developers kit). I am sure, looking back, if DJ had realized how long this process would be, he would have arranged to continue manufacturing the V3 longer and perhaps been a little less ambitious in the scope of the first Revolution release. But 20/20 hindsight only helps "the next time".
Those of you who can stand to wait, it will be worth it.
Alan
Ez-robot should never suspend the V3 until they were ready to sell the new version.
By my math,(with all the usual two months customs delays) when I receive my boards, it will be ONE year after my order!
As far as I know, more than costumers, we are really fans of the Ez-robot. That's why despite all the frustration, we are still here, waiting. And we will.
But.. Will the regular costumer or the market, understand that ? Almost one year of delay ? And no product at all to deliver ?!
It's like if Apple had stopped selling iPhones for an entire year, giving Nokia the chance to grab their costumers...
Folks, think about how can you even compensate your community.
j
@Jayceekeys - We held off on adding the JD eyes to the store just yet because there was an unclear cost around selling them by themselves (without the head) and we wanted to clarify before we put them up for sale. Without that info, we don't even know how much they should cost. For the most part it is finalized, so we will be able to put it up for sale next week. As for the shipping times, DJ is going to update it ASAP to say "July" instead of 5-7 weeks. He is in Eastern Canada for business until Monday and will be able to make the change shortly after (or while he is there if he has time).
In regards to adding the new .stl files, we needed to wait until we had the final final design final with all tiny tweaks included so that they would be the exact same files as the ones we are using for manufacturing. This way, there would be no confusion around design revisions amongst community members. We are currently getting final final design back every 2-3 days so we will start adding the .stl files this month in spurts as we get them.
@Tony1952 - All orders made in June-July 2013 are part of the first "hand built boards". Product numbers included are 3403-3494. After these have been shipped, we are going to review the next waiting orders to see if any of them can be shipped early. We will then move on and look at more orders which only have the EZ-B v4 and developers kit (plus misc items like servos), but not any orders with Robots (because of the plastics included). No promises on these though until we have shipped the first batch and have a clear idea of how many boards we have left to ship out to the next wave of customers (we were only able to get our hands on 100 Wifi modules in such short notice which is why we can only prep that many boards. Usually, it takes 8 weeks to get the Wifi modules, so we had to find a small batch of them from a different distributor (and paid much higher costs on them).
@thetechguru - We discussed the possibility of continuing to manufacture V3 boards while we prepped the V4, but quickly realized that our customers would feel "ripped off" if they bought a V3, and then the V4 was released with bigger and better specs. Now that was under the assumption that manufacturing wasn't going to take this long...
In short, I agree. We should have continued to manufacture the V3 boards if manufacturing was going to take this long, and then stop selling V3 boards right around this time.
@jaultman - This is definitely not the first impression we wanted to leave, and I apologize for this! Usually we confirm new orders and are able to ship them out in less than 48 hours. As you noticed, we have gone through some unexpected delays and there has been a bit of confusion around shipping dates (our fault). Once products are shipping reliably to all customers in July, I hope the excitement of building robots returns to you and your son
Clears it up perfectly as far as I can see. Thanks
No further questions your honour