The Sensel Morph: INTERACTION, EVOLVED.

Resuming Shipping | Please Update your Address
almost 7 years ago – Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 11:44:07 PM

Dear Backers,   

We're very pleased to report that we're resuming shipping tomorrow.

Resuming all Shipments
almost 7 years ago – Sat, Jun 17, 2017 at 11:52:01 PM

Dear Backers,

Thanks again for all your patience. We are really excited to let you know that we are resuming shipments to international backers and will start shipping devices which contain Art Overlays on June 26th. We know you have all been frustrated with the delays so we wanted to provide a little bit more transparency so you know what’s been going on behind the scenes.

International Shipping

Because we are shipping to approximately fifty countries, we have had a number of challenges with international shipments. The first is that backers that received their devices prior to June 8th received invoices with higher values than what they paid, and as a result, were overcharged on VAT fees. We are sending all of these backers corrected invoices so that they can get refunds from their customs office or FedEx. The second challenge is that in many cases Sensel was paying as much as $100 more than we we had charged in shipping fees per order. This was not only affecting us, but also some of our backers, since some countries assess VAT/GST fees on shipping costs.

We have been working closely with our fulfillment center and shipping carriers over the last several weeks on these issues and the good news is that going forward, all backers will receive a correct invoice and any VAT, GST, and/or duty fees will be based on the exact value of merchandise (for some countries, plus shipping cost paid) and our shipping costs have been reduced down to approximately what we charged our international backers. We have been restarting international shipments gradually to make sure there are no more surprises. Everything has been going well so far and we expect to start international orders to all countries in a week.

Art Overlays

The reason for the delay on orders containing Art Overlays is that the Sierra update of OSX broke support for graphics tablets which use the standard HID interface (our device worked perfectly on earlier versions of OSX). We didn’t want to have backers receive devices that didn’t work right out of the box, so we decided to delay shipments on devices with Art overlays until the issue was corrected.

We lost weeks trying to diagnose and correct the issue because Apple didn’t have any documentation for the change, and we assumed we were doing something wrong on our side with regards to how we were communicating over the USB bus. In the end, the only thing that worked was writing an OSX driver, which required a significant effort from our software team. The good news is that with the new driver, the device is working great again in OSX. The software team is now putting the finishing touches on the driver and has committed to releasing it by next Friday, allowing us to resume shipments the following Monday, June 26th.

Device Availability

There are about 500 devices currently at our fulfillment center that are ready for international shipments and another 500 on the way to our fulfillment center from the factory. The factory is also continuing to build several hundred devices per week, thus we expect the vast majority of Kickstarter orders to be fulfilled in the next several weeks.

Again, thank you so much for your patience and support. We are really excited to get devices out to all of you as soon as possible!

All the Best,

The Sensel Team

Shipment Update and Moogfest
almost 7 years ago – Sat, May 27, 2017 at 09:53:41 PM

Dear Backers,

As of several weeks ago, we have restarted production and are building several hundred Morphs each week. Many of you have already received your devices and we've really enjoyed all of the projects that have been shared with us thus far!

For the remainder of you who have yet to receive your Morphs, shipping is being gated on two things:

1) Art Overlays: We want to make sure all the functionality of the Morphs works out of the box when you receive your devices. The team is currently making the finishing touches to firmware and software to support art use cases. Orders containing art overlays will start shipping once we get the thumbs up from our hard-working software team.

2) International Shipments: Some of our international backers notified us that they were charged excessive VAT fees. We are now working with a shipment consultant to make sure we have correct paperwork for each country that we’re shipping to (we have backers in 54 countries so this is no easy feat). We plan to resume international shipments next week with a few test shipments to make sure the issue has been resolved.

All orders that are not international and don’t contain the Art Overlay should have already shipped out. If you are based in the USA, did not order an Art Overlay and did not receive your Morph, please contact us at [email protected] and we'll get it sorted out.

Once again, we appreciate your patience and are working diligently to make sure all our backers get their Morphs as soon as possible!

All our Best,

The Sensel Team

P.S. Thanks to everyone that was able to come by and visit our booth at Moogfest! Here is one of our favorite photos from the event:

Production Restart and Media Editing Overlay Update
almost 7 years ago – Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 05:24:56 PM

Dear Backers,

We have some good news to share with you...

Production:

We assembled twenty PCBs this past week and they passed a full battery of tests by our engineers... woo hoo! So, we will be re-starting production this Monday, and shipping 500 units as soon as they come off of the production line. We are also kicking off production of an additional 1500 PCBs to replace the balance of defective PCBs which will be assembled as soon as they come in from our PCB fab.

Media Editing Overlay:

We finalized the design of the Media Editing Overlay and are starting to tool the mold at our factory. If you guys remember, the Media Editing Overlay was the winning submission (by Cliff Edwards... thank you Cliff!) of the overlay contest. This ended up being the most complex of the ten overlays to design, because we weren't experts on video/audio editing, and needed to do a lot of research to understand how to make this a useful overlay. But, after a significant amount of iteration and user testing, we feel we have come up with a design that we think is quite possibly awesome! We will be sharing more details about this new design, as well as the production timelines in the coming weeks and can't wait to see what you think of it.

Finally, we wanted to extend a big thank you to all the backers who have sent us feedback and posted to social media about your experiences getting started with the Morph. This feedback is really important for us as we think about what features to add to our firmware, software and overlays and how to improve our product going forward.

We are so overwhelmingly happy to have all of you start exploring what the Morph can do and please remember to reach out to us at [email protected] if you run into any trouble.

All our best,

The Sensel Team

Some Exciting Updates
about 7 years ago – Sat, Apr 22, 2017 at 12:25:11 AM

Dear Backers,

We have a few pieces of great news for you today:

1) A new version of our C API is now available on github. Among many other improvements, this version adds support for multiple devices and the ability to read raw force images. We have also released an Arduino API which enables direct communication to a Sensel Morph using the cable provided with the innovator's kit. If you are planning to develop with either of these APIs, you must first update to the latest version of the firmware using the Sensel app, which is available on our web site.

2) We have received 500 new PCBs in house. They have passed our initial inspection and we are very confident that they are defect free. We are assembling a small batch of these into devices next week to verify that the issue we saw previously has been corrected, at which point we will turn our assembly line back on and start churning out more Morphs, which we expect to be better than ever!

3) Last, but certainly not least, we're happy to tell you that we shipped 155 Morphs from our fulfillment center this week! We're very excited to get this batch of devices out to you. If your unit was included in this batch, you should have received an email from FedEx containing tracking information. If you didn't receive an email, don't worry, your shipment will be included in one of the following batches which will be shipping throughout May. When you receive your Morph, remember to download the Sensel app to update firmware and configure overlays. If you have any questions come up as you start using your Morph, we encourage you to check out the User Guide or contact [email protected].

Thank you once again for your ongoing patience and support and have a wonderful weekend!

All our best,

The Sensel Team