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The following is an edited excerpt of a forum post by fearless LZX leader, Lars Larsen. The full post is available here.
My dearest LZX community,
Sometimes making something important is messy. Pushing boundaries can reveal that those boundaries are thicker than initially perceived. In steering our company through our past decade of activities, survival has often depended on placing a bet on our capabilities as a team to meet a specific release date, asking for support and funding for the project from the community, and then willing our way to a triumphant release – more often tardy than not.
The two projects which are our main focus right now, TBC2 and Chromagnon, have dragged out beyond my initial bets--two years in the case of TBC2 and going on 10 months for Chromagnon. These are our two most ambitious projects to date and the amount of engineering work going into them has been staggering.
We are fixated on delivering these projects with a degree of excellence that is beyond our past work and are very proud of where we’ve come with them. Now we are on the brink of releasing them both. We are so excited about these projects, but neither are in your hands yet; for that, I am obligated to extend a heartfelt apology and an update.
TBC2s are all built and the assemblies are beautiful. We plan to ship them in late January, after another month of rigorous testing. Before we do that, we need to replace the SD card sockets in all of them to prevent an issue you will be glad not to have on the receiving end. We also must finish a firmware release. I am finalizing our new video graphics engine (that will run firmware for all our devices) and Ed is finalizing the HD scaler/deinterlacer designs. Both of us, as parents (of three school age kids each), have had to deal with extraordinary unexpected demands on our time this year, due to the pandemic; thus, developing some features have been slow going.
On top of that, I doubled down on several feature goals for TBC2 and it has cost us a lot of time. I made these calls the week after I had to send everyone from LZX home for several weeks, in the early days of the pandemic. I didn’t know what was going to happen at all at that point, so I doubled down on what I could: making sure that, if these products had more delays, it would have been worth the wait. But I made a bad call and now it has delayed us even further. The good news is that the software architecture we’ve been building is much further advanced than it otherwise would be. That does nothing for you now, but you will see why it will in 2021.
Finally, as of this week, we released most of the Chromagnon design for production. We will be going into 2021 in full production mode, with Chromagnon as the only project the workshop is building for a while. We plan to have the first 500 units (which includes all of your preorders so far) shipped by the end of March. This is one full year after the initial shipping estimate.
Most of the delay on Chromagnon is for the same reasons as TBC2 (on the firmware/software side, they are much the same project). While Ed and I have been preoccupied with the software architecture, Jonah has been going through every single circuit with a fine toothed comb, ensuring the hardware release will be smooth and easy.
A reminder: If you’re tired of waiting, we’re happy to exchange your preorder credit for a different product. If you can stand a little more waiting, your eyeballs will be super glad for it. And that is a promise I can make you!
Thank you for believing in us, what we are trying to do, and for being a part of it. Thank you for your role in enabling us to spend our lives in pursuit of this work. We are grateful for it every day.
LARS
Production Update
In addition to the above update, the production team is completing work on Mapper, Sensory Translator, Memory Palace, Fortress, and another batch of Diver. Watch our social media accounts for restock announcements.
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