Stephen Hawes

April 2025 Opulo Update

Hi all, and welcome to the April 2025 Opulo Update! Let's get right into it.

Lead Times

Since the last update, we've made some good progress on our lead time! We're consistently shipping much quicker than our listed lead time, but we're officially keeping it where it is to help us stay ahead by a margin.

16mm and 24mm Feeders

We've been working on a new prototype for wider feeders, and we're really happy with how testing has gone so far! Moving the film peeling mechanism above the tape path has been a huge improvement for wide tape. We have a fully working EVT prototype, and we're diving into refining and UX passes now. There will likely be a YouTube video showing this prototype's development this Saturday, if I'm able to finish the edit in time!

By peeling the wide film straight back, we're able to keep it straight and smooth, keeping peeling much simpler and more easily avoiding the adhesive.

v4 DIY Kits

We've completed a first pass of v4 DIY Build docs!

Lucian (our Head of Manufacturing) has been out of the office for a family emergency, so I've been backfilling some sourcing efforts. We're working on getting more stock in soon so that we can comfortably release the full v4 scratch-build and upgrade kits without jeopardizing normal LumenPnP orders. 

The first pass of our docs is mainly comprised of some notes that go along with our internal work instructions. If you don't want to wait to upgrade to/build a v4, you can use our draft instructions and buy all the parts piecemeal that you need for your build. You can see our WIP instructions here.

Podcast

Many of you have noticed we haven't been keeping up with our normal podcast cadence lately! Lucian being out of office has put a pause on recording and made things quite busy here, but we're working on getting new episodes out!

We have a pre-recorded episode we're shooting to release next week, plus we'll be doing guest episodes as time allows. Thank you for your patience; we're excited to get back to our normal schedule!

Documentation

Mitchel has been aggressively working on the documentation rewrite over the past few weeks. Some great highlights:

  • Huge increase in GIF usage, making each step much clearer and better demonstrating how certain steps are performed
  • Fully splitting v3 and v4 calibration instructions, resulting in much less ambiguity
  • A change in the order of some steps so that certain things don't need to be repeated
  • Visual overhaul, making things easier to follow and understand

We're hoping to have this new version of docs out within a week or so, so keep an eye out for when that happens!

Reach Out

If you have any feedback, questions, or comments about this update, please don't hesitate to reach out to us here.

Thanks, and we'll see you next month!

-Stephen