Just a quick suggestion. I think the servo Calibration instructions should come before the assembly instructions in the tutorials. I just got a new Six from Brookstone, and because I have some experience, I calibrated the servos before starting assembly. It is a good thing because one of them was off by 90 degrees (and most were off by one or two gear teeth, nothing that a servo profile couldn't have fixed). Also a good thing because I discovered that the 20 amp fuse inside the body was missing....
I then went through the tutorial, even though I have done it before and am experienced with EZ-B robots, this is my first Six. I noticed that the assembly instructions were before the calibration instructions. If I had assembled first and then discovered that one of the servos was badly out of calibration, it would have been frustrating. Since I calibrated first, it was no big deal.
Alan
They used to be - but rarely do parts come not calibrated. There's a bunch of places where it points to the calibration as troubleshooting if there are problems - so a new user would never become frustrated unless they weren't following the instructions. We haven't had an issue in a year reported with customer service regarding that. :)
Ok. Certainly fits my general experience. 3 Revolution bots and a bunch of extra servos and only one was way out of calibration.
Probably better to handle the one off issues than put the calibration instructions up front and maybe scare away the casual user.
Alan
Yeah, that's what the general census was as well. Our feedback mechanism had people asking why they needed to get a screw driver out when everything was okay out of the box.
With the few thousand units we ship per month of robots, there's bound to be some quality issues. Just sucks when they're concentrated in some of the community members.
It's something we, and every company are working to address - to what cost? That's the question. Throw more money at it merely increases the cost of the product. So if less than 1% of issues occur, that's way more cost effective than increasing pricing and delays for the less than 1%.
Well, just another joy of owning a company :)
I have told this story before, but it bears repeating. I used to belong to the Verizon Wireless Customer Council, a market research group sponsored by Verizon (before they killed the budget). There were about 100 members, 38 of us very active. Every few months they would send is the latest "flagship" phones to test out and rewview. just before or just at commercial release. This was not a Beta test, but commercial ready products. Of the 100 shipped at least 1 would be dead on arrival and one or two more would have a serious software or hardware problem, so basically a 3% failure rate, and this from the largest carrier in the US amd some of the largest manufacturers (Motorola, HTC, LG, Samsung, and RIM). If you have a few failures once in a while, I think you are doing really well.
Alan