January (and a bit of February) in a nutshell

There was no warning...

...no time to adjust or to regroup. It started just like that, all of the sudden on the 1st of January. At the time when most people were, in all likelihood, enjoying their day off, perhaps remembering the night before, perhaps revisiting their new year’s resolutions and gently debating whether they should join a gym or perhaps buy a tennis racket, I was already up to my elbows at work.

The company email box, kickstarter email box and all social media were full of messages from backers and fans waiting impatiently for answers and updates. I hugely enjoy interacting with such a wonderful audience and always try to give my best answers, which means quite often I need to do a bit research, which in turn results in some inevitable delays. And similarly, in this case it took me the best part of 4 hours journey to catch up with all the messages.

Next was the backerkit. I knew we were almost ready but backerkit was flagging some potential errors which had to be resolved before the surveys were going to be out. I tried contacting backerkit but to my never-ending surprise nobody seemed to be working at there on the 1st so my questions had to wait... In the end it took another week and a couple of skype calls with their support to sort out some minutiae.

And so, it began on the first day... I was pleased I got into it without any hesitation and tackled growing pile of tasks in the best fashion possible - head on. I love it, love when it gets almost unbearably busy and chaotic and I love the hustle.

I was ready physically and mentally for what I knew would later turn out to be one of the busiest months of my professional life, certainly the busiest at Novo.

Now let me fast forward a bit, skip some of the less glamorous day to day stuff, and get to the most memorable and evocative moments.

New Office

I had been looking for potential offices for some time and knew exactly what kind of space we needed. The Boatshed in Salford Quays (Manchester) seemed almost ideal. A perfect combination of functionality and quirkiness right by the river and almost exactly half way between Salford Media City and Manchester City Centre. Did I mention great communication links?

Now the lease is underway, and the moving date is set to 8th of Feb, which in fact was yesterday, which in turn means I'm actually posting this blog post from the new office :)

Things indeed move quickly here at Novo.

New Office inside

New office outside

Design and Development

SRV and SRV+

We have built a second demo kit. Doesn't sound very interesting, does it?

What if I told you this demo kit kits into a flight case and contains a fully operational mini heating system. You know, with a small boiler, a small radiator, all the piping (with real water), a pump and a bypass valve (safety first) and of course Novo Smart Valve. And superhub. And it all works anywhere in the world. Well almost everywhere - we need at least a reasonable 3G connection.

Our plastic suppliers in China were also quite busy and delivered SRVs 2nd and 3rd sets of plastic (so called T2 and later T3 tooling). Sadly, T2 were not 100% robust and showed some stress marks around the clips after a longevity test. We quickly improved the design and T3 samples are already under tests.

Demo kit

Demo kit - plumbing

Flight case for the demo kit

The SRV+ plastics is technically unaffected but only because we stopped the tooling making the moment we identified problems with SRV plastics. The designs are not identical but share many features so learnings from one are transferable to the other one.

The delay "allowed" us to do more work and ultimately implement improvements to the LED ring design, which will result in more uniform ring illumination for SRV+.

Don't worry if you are the SRV fan - the upgrade will be implemented there too.

New test "house" built - pic below during the assembly. Things are being added to it at the moment so please bear with us. We're putting a permanent camera right in front of it so everyone will be able to see the system live. At some point we will also add visual representation of what each valve is doing and controls so logged in users can change temperature and see live how valves react.

"Mini" test house under construction.

Software

There has been an enormous amount of work done on the backend of our platform... The guys are creating a nice writeup about all the work and immediate future plans so please watch this space in the next few days.

Finally a bit of an update from the production front (guest written by Bruce)

These are exciting times at Novo. The first small production run of injection mouldings for the SRV arrived this morning - real plastics in real quantities - a bit late but here at last! I have to say, they have turned out rather nicely - even if I do say so myself! As you can see from the pictures, we now have enough plastic parts to build a pilot run. Sourcing the other components, such as cap nuts etc to make these first SRVs is done and we are now waiting for these to arrive. As this process goes on, we are concurrently refining the design of the SRV+, putting into place the lessons we have learned from the design and development stages of the SRV. 
We are currently tendering for quotes to produce an initial batch of the plastics and other components to enable us to put together some SRV+ units and get them on our extended test. Thankfully, in the new office we have a dedicated space to do this exercise in comfort. 
The speed of development is still mind-boggling to me sometimes. It just goes to show how rapidly the team here at Novo can adapt and change that the most frustrating and time-consuming part of the process is now waiting for our parts to be manufactured and delivered!

T3 pre-production plastics arrived

T3 pre-production second box