We’ve been busy at work since our last update. Since that time we have made some significant design changes for the beta units, started production on those, and have done plenty of testing. Not to mention a lot of essential but less exciting work to ensure we can launch in the near future.
I want to thank all the folks that reached out to participate as beta testers. We still have very limited production capacity at this time, and have had to limit who we chose to participate. Most of those who reached out would have been great beta testers, but unfortunately it isn’t possible for us to have everyone participate right now. I hope you all keep following our progress.
We have made a number of design changes as we’re moving from alpha prototypes to the betas. If you’ve visited the front page, you may have noticed some of these already.
The most notable change is the battery and its housing.
I have to admit that I had not properly accounted for everything when I did my initial estimates for the total vertical from a charge, and we were falling short of our target 800m when testing with the first battery we spec’d. We’ve since upgraded to a higher capacity battery, that has the additional benefit of better cold weather performance. Unfortunately this adds some weight to the system, but we think that the performance improvement is well worth it.
For those that want even more vertical from the PL1, we’ve updated the housing to make it easier to swap out a battery in the field. Instead of 4 captive screws we switched to using one large knob, that can be turned by hand, and a molded latch to keep everything secure.
The outer frame has been redesigned to trim some weight and make it easier to manufacture and assemble.
We have been able to get plenty of testing in since February. We have been posting some of the footage from that on Instagram and Facebook. We’ve made a short compilation of some of that testing below.