To recap, three months ago we announced that we were experiencing a major issue with the GravityLight unit that we have been developing. The bead cord, which is used to lift the bag and control its descent, was experiencing tangles at a rate that we deemed unacceptable.
We outlined the failure in this blog post and updated the shipping time table to October 2016 for ASAP pledges and December 2016 for everyone else. The decision to delay, even by only a couple of months, was not taken lightly – but ultimately, it was the right call to make, as we could not sign off on a product that failed to deliver its maximum potential to the end user.
We were overwhelmed by the amount of support that we received from our Indiegogo backers, urging us to take the time to ensure that ‘we got it right’ for the sake of those people in Kenya and other parts of the world that will come to benefit from our technology.
We prototyped our reworked ‘Pulley Build GravityLight’ and put it through it’s paces on the accelerated life testing rig. In May, we updated the original blog post and sent out a further update, demonstrating our progress.
As of today, we are pleased to announce that the tangling issue has been completely resolved (100% success rate) and that the timetable we outlined is on track.
The pulley has preformed as our engineers anticipated, completely controlling the bead cord throughout the entirety of the bag ‘lift’ and ‘drop’ – leaving no potential for the cord to get itself into a tangle.
The reworked components have been tooled and production is set to start on schedule. We will share a further update once the injection molded components have been produced – so far so good!