Getting Robi ready for other families.

Until now, every Robi has been a one-off. I build them by hand from hobby boards, and right now exactly one of them works. That’s fine for testing at home. It doesn’t work for the next step, which is putting Robi in other families’ homes for a beta. Almost everything this month has been about closing that gap.

The biggest piece is the circuit board. It replaces the stack of hobby boards and wires inside the prototype with one board a factory can assemble, so I can build tens of Robis instead of one. The wiring on the board is finished and checked. Next is ordering a first small batch, then a few weeks of making sure those boards actually work before any go into a Robi. That puts the beta in December at the earliest. There’s good news on parts, too: a supplier now says at least twenty Raspberry Pis arrive November 23rd, so some beta units should be with families by the end of the year, and the supply crunch may be easing.

The prototype taught me something along the way. In August it stopped working, and it took weeks to find out why: a corrupted memory card, not the power problem I’d assumed. While it was down, there was nothing to test the app on. So before the new boards arrive, I’m building a second unit that stays on my desk and never goes camping.

The other piece is the families. Two weeks ago I started calling parents from the waitlist to learn how their kids listen today and what Robi would need to do for them. It’s early, only a handful of calls, but they’ve sharpened a question I can’t answer from my desk: can a kid pick what to listen to from everything on Robi, with nothing to look at that tells them what’s there? A card or a figurine puts the story in your hand. A screen with cover art would make the whole library obvious. Without either, a kid has to remember what’s on it, or a grown-up has to tell them. The original hypothesis, and the way Robi works today, is that kids will cycle through what they have and rediscover it as they go. I’m less sure of that now.

Which brings up the thing I said Robi would never have: a screen. I may have over-indexed on “screen free.” What I care about, and maybe what parents care about too, is “smartphone free,” and I’d never separated the two. The phone or the tablet is the device built to hold a kid’s attention. A small screen that shows nothing but cover art isn’t that. It might even help: a kid who can see what’s on Robi can pick for themselves, and that’s one less reason to hand them a phone. It would also mean months of redesign, on a shell I’m more attached to than I’d like to admit. I’d rather work that out with a few families now than with Kickstarter backers later.

Next: order the boards, build the bench unit, and keep talking to parents.