Today we are excited to announce a Kickstarter Campaign for our first product, the T100 Thruster.
The T100 is an underwater electric motor and propeller that is powerful, resistant to saltwater corrosion, and extremely affordable at $99 each. Before now, you would have to spend $500-$3,000 to buy a thruster, making marine robotics an exclusive field reserved for government, institutions, and large companies. We hope to change that.
The Kickstarter campaign will launch on August 12th, 2014 at 8:30am Pacific, but you can check out a preview of it right now:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/847478159/913072768?token=fec31ec5
Please feel free to let us know what you think and spread the word! We need your help to make this happen!
You need to implement limits on all the funding options you have supported – you really don’t want to be inundated with thousands of orders you can’t fulfill. For the $99 option, I suggest a limit of 500, and for the $89 option, I suggest a limit of 50 rather than 30. I also suggest you place a photo of someone holding the thruster, as it’s hard to imagine donating $100 for an object of somewhat indeterminate size. It could be smaller than a teacup, for all I know.
It would also be awesome if you offered reversible ESCs to go along with the thrusters, as the reversible ESCs available on the market today are very limited in power rating. That would make running one of these babies much easier.
Hi Paul, thanks for the comments. We have raised the number of early-bird backers to 50. If we get more orders than we expect then we may have to push back some of the deliveries slightly. On the other hand, we’ll be able to hire more help and buy parts in larger quantities, keeping the costs down. We’ll consider a limit.
The thruster is about 3.5″ diameter, the size of grapefruit. We’ll add a picture with a hand for scale. That’s a good idea.
We have some excellent low-cost reversible ESCs that work great with the thruster. I think it’s a great idea to offer them as part of the Kickstarter. We’ll look into that as well.
Thanks again for your comments!