Hard Drive Received!

We have just finally received the hard drive from China. We will begin to review the hard drive and make sure there are no issues with it.

We’ve learnt a lot more over the last month that we are not happy about. Unfortunately, we have found out that the Chinese team that we hired, had actually outsourced much of our project to other companies without telling us, which was very upsetting to hear. After hearing this, it started making sense why we’ve had so many issues. For instance, our PCBA, firmware, etc was all designed and worked on by the PCBA manufacturer, when it was supposed to be worked on by our Chinese team. It seems anytime we were speaking to one of the Chinese team members, they were playing ‘telephone’ and giving instructions to the other companies along the way. We’ve confirmed this with the PCBA factory and the too shared the same problems with the Chinese team because of it.

So why were the files taking so long last month to make into an archive? It seems that the files were on the PCBA manufacturer’s server and instead of downloading the files to their hard drive, they were transferring it from the server to an external hard drive for us. They then were creating compressed files on the external hard drive, and then also uploading to wetransfer from the external hard drive. The problem with this is that the external hard drive’s read and write speeds are much slower than the computer’s hard drive. Therefore doing all of this compressing, and uploading adds an extra layer of time. Furthermore, there are just so many files in our project that the transfer just takes much longer.

So how did we find out? After much deliberation, and several other delays and problems with the Chinese team, we decided to send one of our Canadian team members to China to get our files. When he went to the Chinese teams office, unaware, they put him in a car and took him to the PCBA factory. He spent an entire day there trying to hunt down and collect our files from them. It’s unfortunate, but this is how we had found out about the Chinese team was outsourcing our project to other companies. Unfortunately we had him try to upload and send us the compressed file, but because the internet in China is so bad, and there were issues for him as well, we had him ship the USB3.0 - 500gb hard drive to our offices – which took a week. The good news is we have just received the hard drive and have begun to download our files. After our initial review, it seems that the total amount of files is a little under 2 million files and the entire source code and driver files are around 125gb. The transfer of those hard drive files to our computer for some reason are slower than expected – fluctuating between 200kb - 2mb - 20mb, and took 1+ day to transfer. Perhaps the hard drive from China is not a good one, or maybe the amount of files or security on the files just added some extra time that we weren’t expecting.

Over the next few weeks we will review the files, try to make builds of our operating system, and make sure we are not missing anything.

This update is not good but it is also not bad. We need some time to figure out if there are any issues. We’ve had many issues with the Chinese team before, and now that we’ve uncovered that they were outsourcing third party companies for our work, they’re assisting even less than before. If there are any hiccups we will do our best to overcome them as best as we can.

One customer asked us, what happens if we encounter more issues and cannot get the things we need. This would be very bad and it would mean we would have to redesign everything with the electronics and recreate our source code which takes at least 18 months – that is not good for anyone, and we will do everything in our power to avoid that, because that would be a disaster.

Those who are receiving the trail production units should know that those units will not leave until we can make sure our builds are working and tested – we estimate between 2-3 months from now.  

We believe it is still too soon to give an estimate, but initial assumptions are that shipments will not be shipped before March/April 2025. As our project progresses and we have a better understanding of our files, we will have a better idea of our estimated shipping date.

While these technical hurdles have posed significant delays, we have not been idle. Our team has been updating our safe operating system and mobile app as we want to ensure a great user experience with your safe. Our teams continue to remain fully committed to delivering your safes as quickly and efficiently as possible.

While your contribution helps to bring something new closer to reality, we ask that you continue to have patience until our project is complete. The negative comments and emails we receive do not help us complete this project any faster; rather it makes us feel like anything we do is not good enough. So please once again, we ask that you hold back from your negativity.

Sorry for the delay. Thank you for your unwavering support, your understanding and patience during this time are greatly appreciated.

TLDR - SUMMARY

• We just got our files from China, and we are starting to look at them.

• The China team was dishonest and outsourced most of our project without telling us.

• If all goes well, we estimate the trail production will ship out in 2-3 months.

• Mass production won’t ship before April 2025.