To everyone,

After a week of great visibility at remotecentral.com my mailbox [email protected] is turning RED, just today I got one email each 30 minutes.

Please understand that I can’t reply to all of you immediately.

I managed the risk in my Rev 1 by doing a not so big investment in parts and equipment. Not true for my time though. The way it was done it takes roughly ONE hour of work to realize it. I can’t produce in this condition and you’ll understand that the Rev 1 is not viable for this main reason. If you do the math, for the entire requests I got today even if I work 24H/7D I won’t be able to meet the demand.

This week I picked up few individuals and offered them the Rev 1. This will give me some feedbacks on the remote, the documentation, and the usability with various IR remotes. Daniel Tonks from RemoteCentral also published CCF for Pronto.

So the Rev 2 is now in design phase. I’ll do my best to keep the part cost as low as possible and still have a professional implementation. The Rev 2 requires more parts so the part cost becomes more important. But where I gain, is the ability to move that to large production if demands are there. I'll do another post for the ETA.

The BIG question everyone is asking, what would be the cost of it? I’ll do my best to not exceed 40$. Next it will be the volume that will drive down the price. Volume == lower parts and manufacturing cost.

No it won’t be at 20$ like a few have suggest. At 20$ its like if I was paying you to own my device :)

The dimensions of the box I’m planning to use in the Rev 2 are 3.9” x 0.82” x 2.14” (100mm x 21mm x 54mm), a relatively small box. And no, I can’t go smaller; Sony circuit is ruling this. This light and sturdy box will also helps drive down the shipping cost (vs Rev 1).

The Rev 2 is also a Do-It-Yourself product. You’ll have to buy the Sony remote, remove the Sony circuit, and finally integrate that in my box, a totally solderless job done in 10 minutes. I’ll provide full explanation on how to do it. Again, it’s the volume that justifies this. To sustain this week demands the BestBuy close to me would be out of stock in a snap, briefly good for them, but not for me.

The Rev 2 will not use batteries. The general consensus is that the external power supply makes more sense because it’s a box that you’ll forget (even though you had dreamed of it for long time).

Another frequent question I had, while I’m at it, why not implements a true homegrown BlueTooth/IR device. Simple, I don’t have over 15K$ to invest on this and moreover I’m sure Sony will never make the encryption keys of their BlueTooth available to others.

I hope I’ll reach everyone that have emailed me at [email protected] with this post.

Regards,
Ben