If you’ve looked closely at the status reports for individual parts in recent updates, you may have noticed that the spring motor has been in the engineering review phase for a while now. After many, many rounds of prototypes, our main vendor tripled the per-unit cost, which forced us to find an alternate source. A cost increase on a small part wouldn’t be such a problem, but the spring motor was already the most expensive component, leaving us little choice but to look elsewhere. To put the math in perspective, if the motor originally cost $3 and was tripled to...

Read more