For those of you that are waiting for an Alarm Panel Pro from a recent order or are thinking of buying one, unfortunately we’re completely out of stock right now and I just discovered a delay. We just received our big restock order yesterday from the manufacturer, after a few days delayed in transit. Upon inspecting and prepping the boards for sale, we quickly discovered a manufacturing problem! Regretfully, I have to tell you all that unfortunately we will not be able to fulfill November Alarm Panel Pro orders by the end of the month as previously promised.
These Pros are already on their way back to Houston where our manufacturer, Macrofab, will identify the specific problem and re-work the boards. This is one of the great things about working with a domestic contract manufacturer – it’s quick and relatively painless process to re-work problems. Although this is the largest scale issue we’ve had to date, unfortunately, and it comes at a bad time.
I think in a best case scenario, we’ll have the boards back and ready to ship in 1 to 3 weeks … just in time for Christmas. It’s too soon to say for sure, the manufacturer needs to evaluate the problem and figure out what needs to be done to properly fix it. When I have more details I’ll update this thread.
We’ve had a huge demand for the Alarm Panel Pro this year, and have run out of stock a few times before. It’s also our most complex and expensive product to produce. We’re currently completely out of stock in the U.S., but we do have a few dozen left in both Canada and UK warehouses.
I’m about to send an email to all of you who have a pending order for an Alarm Panel Pro to share the bad news. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have more info from Macrofab with details and timelines for a fix.
Thanks again for supporting Konnected. It really means a lot to me that so many of you worldwide are using our product to secure and smarten your homes.
If anyone in mainland Europe is looking for Pro boards, m.nu has Pro boards in stock. Unfortunately, they don’t ship to the UK but you can try our Amazon UK store.
Good news! I just got off a call with MacroFab where we discussed the failure analysis that they performed today and a resolution. The great news is that the boards are quickly and easily fixable, and they’re getting started on the rework right away. I don’t have date commitments quite yet, but I think we should have at least a partial delivery of working Alarm Panel Pros in about a week, maybe less.
The cause of the problem was due to an alternate/substitute part for a specific component that was used on this batch. It was technically our mistake, because the part was added by us as an alternate, even though it was not compatible with the circuit. The introduction of this part caused a short on the 3.3V voltage supply which prevented the chip on the board from receiving power. It seems like a simple human mistake, adding this part as an alternate, which was one “L” character different from the part that should have been placed.
Anyway, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this batch of Pro boards, so I’m very relieved about that. MacroFab can fix the problem by simply removing the wrong part, and they’ll be good as new.
Good news!
MacroFab started re-working the boards last Friday and the first group of them arrived today. They’re doing the re-work in small daily batches so we can turn them around quickly to fulfill all of your backorders.
Alarm Panel Pro backorders will start shipping tomorrow and will continue all week. Orders will be fulfilled in the order that they were received.
