EEW Fold Completed
Great news on the production front. Assembly for the EEW Fold is fully complete! The shipping container is currently on the water heading toward Massachusetts. I am prioritizing Kickstarter fulfillment the moment the truck arrives at the warehouse. Once those backer orders are out the door, the remaining stock will go up on the site. I ordered a lot of extras so I’m sure there will be enough for everyone who wants one. If everything goes smoothly, expect to see them available in late July or early August on my store.
EEW Drum Carder Prototype Update
In this video I talk about the improvements in the latest drum carder prototype. The biggest of those is the new hybrid drive system. This video shows me talking about and demonstrating different changes to the prototype, but it does not show me carding with it. If this sounds interesting to you, check out this video.
Ghost in the Machine: Navigating Compound Failures
Engineering is often about hitting walls, but this past month I hit two in a row that combined into a particularly frustrating puzzle. It was a classic case of hardware troubleshooting where the tools you trust end up leading you astray.
It started while testing a new anti-spark feature for a new version of the EEW Drum Carder circuit board. A subtle design bug accidentally blocked all power to the board. While I solved this quickly with some board reworks, those kinds of “surgery” repairs always leave a lingering worry: Did I accidentally damage a component or introduce a new issue?
That worry was amplified when my STM32 programmer died without me knowing. The programmers appeared perfectly functional, LEDs were on and my computer saw the device. But it refused to handshake with the chip. This turned debugging into a nightmare because I assumed the issue was with the newly reworked circuit board I was designing. I spent a long time triple-checking my new circuit design, assuming the fault was mine before I finally ordered a new programmer and confirmed that was the problem.
Overlapping failures like these are a headache, but they are an essential part of the process. This process eventually leads to a more reliable tool for the community. The EEW Fold was the first generation of this new unified hardware and software. The more I work on and refine both the hardware and software, the more I’m convinced this will pay long-term benefits to our fiber community. These improvements will be in the EEW Fold, EEW Drum Carder, and EEW Maker Kit. Eventually I will port these benefits to other things like the EEW 6.x and a future version of the EEW Cone Winder. And I’m also convinced it will let me design new fiber tools faster. This is proving true for the EEW Maker Kit where the circuit board was designed in record time (though I still need to test and do the software tuning for it).
Product Updates
Below are estimates and the dates may change.
- EEW Fold – August 2026
- EEW 6.1 – September 2026
- EEW Lazy Kate – October 2026
Happy Spinning,
Maurice
www.DreamingRobots.com
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