Hi all. Neither Keith nor I have time to follow TRF routinely. My thanks to friends who let me know about this thread so I can follow-up.
There is no single "thing that has gone wrong". We are an EXTREMELY small company, each doing our bits part-time. Because Keith's current $dayjob is intensely demanding, on many days "it's just me" doing .. well .. nearly everything. And the last two years have been extraordinarily challenging for several reasons.
I suspect most of you have already heard that we're having to completely re-design existing products just to be able to make more with parts we can actually buy today. Lots of long days and longer nights, hundreds of hours spent searching for available parts, hundreds more trying to get firmware working on new processor chips and to support different sensors.
Less widely known but of at least equal impact to ME have also been deaths and medical challenges both major and minor in the family, and the resulting need to focus on things other than Altus Metrum, and which has also had an effect on my motivation level some days.
I say all that by way of explanation, not as an "excuse".
I apologize for not always replying instantly to emails. I'm pleased to report I'm now down to only 4162 unread messages in my inbox, which is the least that number has been in months. We do suffer as everyone does from the occasional disappearance of some inbound or outbound email due to spam filtering or whatever, but that's less of a problem overall than me just not having enough time to keep up with the email arrival rate on most days. And when I do read an email but don't have an immediate answer, it can sometimes get "set aside" a lot longer than I'm proud of before I get back to it.
I DEEPLY apologize for having things in my repair queue for as much as years sometimes. With very rare exception, I try to never give a specific expectation of completion date for repairs, because they do compete for my attention with "all the other things" .. and repairing boards isn't my favorite activity. There have also been unfortunate incidents where folks handed me a board in person at a launch that got "lost in the shuffle" if I didn't have the ability to get into my ticket tracking system and open an RMA immediately. If you've gotten a 'received' state change email for an item you've sent me on an RMA, I'm highly confident it's physically safe and in my RMA queue waiting for me to attend to it.
Regarding cls' comments about our software. Our code is 100% open source, and we build the ground station applications from a single source tree. Supporting Windows users has been a major challenge for us. Linux and MacOS are pretty easy, but it seems every Windows system works slightly differently due to hardware manufacturers adding their own "value added" software that modifies fundamental OS behavior, Microsoft expecting hardware manufacturers to provide and maintain device drivers, and the plethora of different anti-virus programs that each restrict usage of the system in different ways. Years ago, we started signing the driver .inf file we ship, that merely tells Windows to use the existing USB serial emulation driver to talk to our products, and that helped a lot. But the number of customers having trouble just kept going up. So, starting with 1.9.12, we spent the money to buy a crypto certificate so that we can now sign our installers, and one of our customers submitted the signed installer to Microsoft to help us cross over the threshold from "unknown" to "known" application vendor. I have been startled and amazed at how many "Windows problems" got "fixed" by this, which suggests to me that some percentage of the problems on Windows might be a lot less about whether our code works than about whether some random anti-virus tool trusts our code?
If, knowing that, anyone still thinks our code is a "disaster of epic proportions", please remember that it's all open source, and patches that make things better are always welcome!
Regarding the
[email protected] mailing list. After years of running happily on mailman, we made the mistake of being convinced to transition to the newer mailman3. What a complete disaster. After weeks of things not working well, I *think* the list operation is now relatively stable again. If anyone was treated poorly during the transition, please go to
https://lists.gag.com/mailman3 and see if you can resolve the problem yourself. If not, send me email at
[email protected] describing the problem and I'll do what I can to help!
If I'm actually able to catch up on orders today, I promise to sit down this afternoon and see if I can't plow through some more of the RMA queue.
Thanks to everyone for your interest in our products, and concern about what's what at Altus Metrum.
