Last year was all about migrating Holoseat from a hobby project to a commercial venture. We started the year by incorporating Model B, LLC and transferring the project to the Model B banner. We then began to formalize our development approach setting up an agile process to capture and track our work on Holoseat v0.3 (the first prototype designed for public demonstrations). The spring and summer were consumed by development work and preparations for SyndCon.

SyndCon was amazing! Our fellow Syndies gave us great feedback and encouraged us to bring a Holoseat to market as soon as possible (some even volunteered to help with Holoseat development and testing). Needless to say, we came home with the wind at our backs, but work and life made it hard to fully capture that energy and we hit a snag in the following sprint. Still, we closed the year strong, updating our open source documentation and getting v0.3 certified as open source hardware.

Holoseat v0.3 OSHW Certification

So, what’s in store for 2017? We have two related goals for this year. The first goal is to finalize the hardware design for the Holoseat to support the features on our long term roadmap. The second goal is to run a private beta testing program.  Bryan and I are committed to delivering v1.0 compatible hardware to our beta testers so they can get production level features and support just by upgrading their firmware. This commitment is why it is so important that we finalize the hardware design this year.

While our first sprint of 2017 has not quite started yet, we have not been idle. Bryan and I have spent the first part of the year researching and testing new controller options for Holoseat.

From the beginning, the Holoseat Controller has been based on the Arduino family of development boards, starting with the Duemilanove to the Leonardo to Adafruit’s Feather boards.  Arduinos have served us well, but we are looking to much more with Holoseat and we need something with more power and more options for interfacing with the world. Today I am happy to report that we have selected Next Thing Computing‘s C.H.I.P platform, specifically their Chip Pro. We already have the dev kits in (shown below) and are super excited to be working with this exciting new platform.

CHIP Pro Dev Kit

Want to get involved?  Head on over to the project site and leave us a message on the forums.  Want to keep up with all things Holoseat?  Subscribe to our mailing list.  And stay tuned for the details of the first sprint of 2017.