The following is a transcript of the above video update, so it may not be 100% grammatically correct –
Hey everyone, it’s Nate here from Konnected!
Um … so I got a bit of an update on the Alarm Panel Pro situation and I wanted to be real with you and kind of say this face to face so to speak. It’s not great news, but we’ll get through it.
First recap… um so at the end of December last year 2023 we received a batch of Alarm Panel Pros and during our QA process we quickly realized that they were not connecting via Ethernet the way that they should. Some were connecting, some not at all. Most of them had severe Ethernet link quality issues, so, of course we immediately went into a kind of debug fix mode. Sent most of them back to the manufacturer to see if they could figure out what the problem was, and that’s been ongoing since early January.
In the meantime we’ve had a half dozen engineers from MacroFab, our manufacturer in Houston, looking at it trying different things … replacing the Ethernet controller on the board.
I’ve hired a third-party engineering firm, and they’ve looked at the boards also, tried to do some fixing and debugging, and we’ve basically been a roller coaster. We’ve gone back and forth thinking that oh we have a solution … but no, it didn’t pan out the way we thought. It was basically … long story short is … the fixes that, we thought, were going to get the Alarm Panel Pro back working again with Ethernet haven’t panned out the way that we expected and the boards that are coming back after being fixed – most of them are not meeting the quality expectation that we have.
So, unfortunately, that means that we have to start over with a new batch of Alarm Panel Pros and make some changes to the design that will mitigate this problem completely.
Basically, what I’ve learned over the last three months is that you know the there may be some differences or some deficiencies in the design – specifically in the way that the … you know, the electrons route from the Ethernet port here into the Ethernet controller here. So what we’ve done is re-layed out some of the traces on the board to make that path more direct and less prone to error.
It’s still kind of a mystery as to how this design worked so well for so many years and then, all of a sudden, didn’t. Because almost all of our panels manufactured before late 2023 have been performing just fine, and now they’re not, and we hadn’t really changed much in the design. It could be minor differences in the substrate used to create the PCBs, minor differences in the way that the boards are washed. It’s very difficult to actually come up with the exact root cause.
Anyway, I don’t want to bore you with all the details…
Here’s what we’re going to do and here’s kind of the upshot of it is that we’ve we’ve made some changes to the design of the board that we’re pretty confident are going to fix it and make the board a better quality overall. I don’t have 100% confirmation of that yet because we still need to wait for those PCBs and test them, so that’s another couple weeks out and then assuming that’s good, then the the the boards – the bulk of the manufacturing batch should be another couple weeks after that.
So, that means for those of you who have ordered an Alarm Panel Pro — and we have several hundred backorders – It’s going to be another month wait at least maybe a month to two months. I don’t have a timeline specifically at this time, but as soon as I do I will update you.
What we’re going to do is issue a credit – a promotional credit – to everybody who’s backordered an Alarm Panel Pro. This is a crappy situation for us all. I know you guys --some of you – have been waiting since early February for your boards. Basically, anyone who has ordered an Alarm Panel Pro that’s on back order still will be receiving a $79 promotional credit per board purchased via email here – today, tomorrow or as soon as I can get to it.
That’s true for anybody who continues to purchase an Alarm Panel Pro until they’re in stock. So if you backorder an Alarm Panel Pro now, you will get a $79 credit to use on a future order.
Now we have also we have several hundred of these boards that don’t work very well on Ethernet. However, they work fine on Wi-Fi and are fully functional otherwise. So, unfortunately, we can’t fix the Ethernet, or at least it’s prohibitively expensive to do so, and we’ve decided to just move on from it. So I’m selling these for Wi-Fi only kind of as a liquidation, and the price is $79.
So if you want to – if you’ve purchased an Alarm Panel Pro, and you’re waiting for your Ethernet capable Alarm Panel Pro that we are 100% committed to delivering to you, you will receive a $79 credit which you can then use to purchase one of these Wi-Fi only Alarm Panel Pros – or Ethernet “sort of works” Alarm Panel Pros immediately. These are available to ship immediately.
Or you could use that $79 credit for something else. You could use it towards another Alarm Panel Pro, anything else in our store, one of our new garage door openers, anything you want.
The terms and the details of this $79 promotional credit will be in the post and on the product page.
For those of you who are waiting for your fully functional Alarm Panel Pro, I promise you I’m going to do everything I can to get that to you as quickly as possible, and I am not compromising on quality. It has to pass our tests – because that’s basically the brand that we’ve created. The Alarm Panel Pro is a pro product, and I will insist that it still is a pro product.
So that’s the update about the Alarm Panel Pro. I wish I had better news. This has been very frustrating and challenging and expensive for all of us we’re doing our best to get through it, I hope the $79 credit makes it hurt a little bit less. And that we can continue to provide the best in accessible and affordable IoT and home automation.
Thank you for your support and let me know what you think, and I will be updating you as soon as I get more details from the manufacturer about timelines for the new Pros.
Update on Alarm Panel Pro fulfillment
