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It’s been a busy old time here at Tingbot HQ over the last few weeks. Thanks for all your support and messages, we do love reading ‘em.

Now…update time!

Raspberry Pi 3 & New Casing

We made the decision to hold off finalising our case when we heard rumours about the new Raspberry Pi 3. We wanted make sure that the new board model would also be compatible with Tingbot (added thanks to our backers Max & Beau for being on top of the Pi 3 speculation)

Once we managed to get our hands on one, we made a few tweaks to our side caps to fit around the placement of new components. After a run-in with a rogue new transistor, and one slightly broken Pi later (eek) - the good news is that the modifications are complete and our case is now fully compatible with the Raspberry Pi 3 as well as the B+ and 2 models.

The transistor was a worthy sacrifice in having a Raspberry Pi 3 compatible case. RIP wee fella.

We have received and tested a high quality 3D print of our new design, which we are incredibly happy with and we are now good to go with the tooling process.

As for our injection mould, we have made some allowance for where the PCBs are gripped for shaving the tool down until we get a perfect friction fit…we can’t wait!

Jessie & Tingbot OS

Following up from the release of the Pi 3, we’re updating the base of the Tingbot OS to make sure we’re up to date with new hardware support in Raspbian. Joe has been busy tweaking the build as Jessie has a few differences over Wheezy. Its looking positive that we can transfer to this for our base OS, and make the most of the improvements implemented by the guys at the Foundation.

We have also been making headway on the UI of the Tingbot OS, booting apps and changing settings on the device. See the teaser below, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves just yet but keep your eyes peeled for more on this in the run up to launch.

Tingbot does Hyper Island

Last week Ben took Tingbot on tour to Hyper Island, a (Swedish) Masters Institution specialising in strategy and technology who’ve launched in Manchester.

Students were tasked with researching the capabilities of Tingbot and other emerging technologies like Particle’s Electron.

In just one day, students worked together to come up with their own ideas for how Tingbot could add value to peoples lives, and we were really impressed! They broke out the Play-dough and Lego for bringing their ideas to life. The idea of connecting Tingbot and Wearable devices was a popular one, here are some of our favourites:

‘KidWatch’ is a child’s watch that alerts a parent when a child: moves too fast, travels too far, stays still for too long. The clever bit we liked was that the watch only notifies parents Tingbots when there is an emergency - so children feel free to play without constant supervision whilst parents can still feel reassured of their safety.

‘Melody’ uses wearable data to understand your mood. It measures the levels of heart rate, tension, activity etc and maps this to sounds. As your day progresses and your mood changes, these patterns are pieced together into a song, which you can listen to and an ambient graphical visual. It’s purpose is to provide people with a way to reflect on their day, their mood, how they felt, and how they might do things differently tomorrow.

So a big thanks to DMM Crew7 at Hyper for their super-exciting ideas and smart thinking, we’re looking forward to seeing what more of you plan to do with Tingbot :)

Maker Faire 2016

We are pleased to announce that Tingbot will be returning to Maker Faire UK on 23-24th April in Newcastle. This time last year we were throwing around the idea of launching a crowdfunding campaign and we’re very grateful for all the positive feedback that we received at the show.

Maker Faire was a great experience for us last April and we are hoping to do much more hands-on demos and live sessions with Tingbot this time around. When we have more info we’ll let you know - see you there!

…and finally

The vast majority of the surveys are now in so thanks to everyone for your responses. There are a few left to come in, so if this sounds like you, please get your style choices back to us as we’ll be ordering material very soon.

Thats us for now, hope you are as excited for Tingbot as we are :)

- The Tingbot Team