Black Swift Project: Life After Death

    Hello GT.

    I don’t really want to start the first post on the official blog of a new company with a life-affirming epitaph , but, alas, have to do it. Many of you read posts of the Black Swift company on Habré, which developed and displayed on Kickstarter the same name embedded microcomputer . The blog ended when the free 6 months received under the startup support program (thanks, TM!) Ended, so only those who read updates on Kickstarter themselves learned about further events. Well, fill this gap.

    TL; DR: The Black Swift project, under its original name de facto, died in July of this year. In September, the entire project team left its founder, found investors and created the company Unwired Devices, which, among other things, restarts the Black Swift project under the new name Unwired One. All commitments under Kickstarter are now fulfilled by Unwired Devices.



    Frankly speaking, the story that happened with Black Swift is old and banal: if you have a stable unprofitable business and suddenly a promising project appears, then redirecting money from this project to maintaining a business is a bad, worthless idea. The fact that a business does not have money is usually not the cause of its failures, but its direct consequence; that is, by injecting money you will not do this business more successfully.

    The Kickstarter round went to about zero - that is, the money collected was just enough to produce the required number of boards plus payment of the associated one-time expenses such as a range of MAC addresses, FCC certification and all the little things. Such an economy is quite typical for crowdfunding projects: most successful projects collect amounts in the range from tens to 2-3 hundred thousand dollars, and taking into account the reduced margin for the crowdfunding campaign and all kinds of expenses for launching production, the release of the first batch eats up this whole amount. The idea of ​​crowdfunding for such projects is not to become rich by the next month, but to gain fame, and at the same time to cover the very bones of the organization of production. The exception to the rule are single extremely successful projects that collect millions,

    In fact, in June of this year there was no longer any money in the project - they were used to patch holes and, according to the founder of the project, they should have returned a little later (see above about bad, bad ideas). In particular, a fairly large number of boards were manufactured and, instead of being sent via Kickstarter, brought to Russia to close ruble pre-orders made last winter (unfortunately, all the information on these pre-orders was and remained only with the founder of the project, as well as the boards themselves; how much I understand the situation, so far not everything has been sent there). After that, bare PCBs, passive component coils and a donut hole remained in the warehouse.

    By the end of July, it became clear that the timing “a bit later” was becoming less and less defined - and the team began to worry: firstly, the project is still a pity, and secondly, reputation is a thing that takes a long time to build up and is lost quickly. During July and August I discussed the possible future of the project with potential investors - and by September I came to full consensus with them, including a common understanding about the need to close the debt that arose on Kickstarter.

    In September, the team finally agreed on how to live further - and after that a conversation took place with Dmitry Zherebkov, the project’s initial leader, that it was impossible to live on like that. Unfortunately, Dmitry did not agree with the proposed options, so then we had no choice but to wish him good luck and say goodbye.

    There was no legal design for the Black Swift project: the “Smart Electronics” LLC belonging to Dmitry de jure did not take any part in the project, none of the project participants worked in it and did not receive any money. Simply put, the project founder had at his disposal two sites registered on him personally, but even the texts and pictures on these sites did not belong to him, since he was not their author and did not receive any rights to use them from the Civil Code . The same thing applied to all developed electronics, everything that was made and bought for Kickstarter, and so on and so forth.

    Actually, this helped us: we just left. September 24, Unwired Devices LLC LLC was officially registered), the list of employees of which is familiar to those who remember our Kickstarter campaign - with the exception of the morsview who joined us in September , whom you will also get to know very well soon.

    What is the current situation like?

    • The production of boards for Kickstarter is completed, at the moment Alexey is gluing bags and carrying them to the post office
    • We did not make additional fees for sale, so we will not sell them outside the promised on Kickstarter yet (this applies only to retail sales; if you want to buy wholesale boards in sufficient quantities, please contact)
    • Board support will continue in full
    • Now we are closely engaged in the development of one large project, into which Unwired One will also elegantly fit into one of the components. There will be details (yes, those who thought “there would be some kind of ecosystem to stir up, and not just one bare scarf that is unclear to anyone who needed it”, everyone understood correctly. But what kind of ecosystem it will be will come as a surprise).


    An important point: in connection with the foregoing, the sites black-swift.ru and black-swift.com do not belong to us, we do not control their contents. For the most part, however, they are dead and filled with broken links and articles that have not been updated for months; only on black-swift.ru in the forum there is still some sluggish activity of “initiative users” saving a long-dead project by sharing torrent links with SDKs for six months of freshness and erasing links that provide links on more recent firmware and SDKs lying on a site that does not fit into the line of the party (see links below). At the same time, there are attempts to send fees on ruble pre-orders made before Kickstarter - unfortunately, although we were ready to assume these obligations too, Dmitry refused to transfer them to us.

    Our current site is  http://www.unwireddevices.com/ , the current wiki with descriptions of different procedures is http://www.unwireddevices.com/wiki , the actual file storage with schemes, boards and firmware is  http: //files.unwireddevices .com / files / .

    By the way, the latest link already contains OpenWRT firmware 15.05 Chaos Calmer -  http://files.unwireddevices.com/files/openwrt/ccalmer/1.0/ , as well as a package repository for it, including some interesting things, for example, gstreamer with support H.264 cameras. This repository is registered in our firmware, so with them opkg will correctly take packages from it, and not from downloads.openwrt.org.

    If you didn’t buy Black Swift and don’t wait for Unwired One, but basically like to have fun with OpenWRT - the same link contains fresh VirtualBox images, in which Chaos Calmer is completely assembled out of the box and without a single problem, the OpenWRT toolchain is already assembled, and installed and configured Eclipse. The OpenWRT sources in them are already with our patches, you can see what these patches do, as well as apply them selectively at https://github.com/unwireddevices/openwrt/tree/chaos-calmer (in particular, for example, if you need H.264 support on Barrier Breaker, then gstreamer1, together with patches, can be transferred there without problems). In addition, compared to the Black Swift patches for Barrier Breaker, the patches for Chaos Calmer are aligned with the standard OpenWRT build system.

    On this positive note, let me bow. This text has been sorted out with the past, the next time we will be exclusively about the future.


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