2018 Hiatus

Thu, Jul 12, 2018

Hi everyone.

I have some sad news. For the time being, I am going to stop manufacturing and selling Happy Bubbles devices. There are two reasons for this.

The first are the recent US tariffs that went into effect which would all but eliminate my margins from selling the Presence devices and beacons. My partners in China source the components and assemble the boards, which are then sent to me in the USA from where I flash, test, and ship them. With the recent tariffs, this is no longer feasible for me and would probably cause me to lose money or have to raise prices significantly.

It’s unfortunate and the effect of these tariffs means that if one day I do decide to resume selling them, the entire process will need to be in China. So I have some work to do and an opportunity to go back to the drawing board to see if I can improve the product to make it simpler to assemble, flash, test, and ship all from China; as well as hopefully add features.

Which leads me to my second reason, my wife and I just gave birth to our second child and between my full-time work and growing family, it’s harder to find the time right now to work on Happy Bubbles. It’s just too small of an operation to continue alone and I’m sorry to any of you who may have wanted to purchase more devices or were relying on them for something else. I hope you understand.

However it is because of all of these kinds of situations that arise that I’ve chosen to open source everything from the very beginning. So that if someone wants to make these devices for themselves, everything is on Github to be able to do so. Furthermore, because the devices do not talk to any cloud services, all your existing purchases will continue to work just fine without any interruptions. :)

Finally, if you would be so kind as to respond to a little survey that would help guide future products: https://goo.gl/forms/osWJW9KWP4hQpIUn2 I would really appreciate it.

Thank you for all your business and interest in the product. I hope to be back in business soon.