Building Linden in the open.
Why does every smart-home device look like it belongs in a hospital?
Most of them are made in factories that build forty different products a year, in plastic enclosures shaped by injection-mold tooling, finished in colors picked by committees, sold in stores for ninety days before the next SKU. The thing you'd put on your nightstand has more in common with a printer cartridge than with a piece of furniture you'd keep.
Linden is the other thing.
Three production runs, in order.
Run A — One prototype
Built in the basement workshop, on the bench. This is the unit we'll cycle through firmware, drop on different surfaces, leave running for a month, and measure with an anemometer to confirm the airflow numbers.
Run B — Five loaned betas
Five real units, built to the production spec, sent to live in real homes for six months. No sale. They come back, we read what they recorded, we fix what didn't work.
Run C — Twenty-five numbered units
The first commercial run. Each one engraved with its serial — 1 of 25 through 25 of 25 — and signed by hand inside the bottom panel. Once sold, the run closes. The next run is different.
We don't have a public ship date yet. Run A is the work in front of us. When Run B comes back from the field, we'll know what to promise.
A small first run is what you can actually ship.
A basement, a hot iron, a vacuum bag, a print farm, and one person to finish each unit by hand. Twenty-five is what we can keep good in the time we have.
It's also how you find what's wrong before you have to find it for two hundred people at once. A run of twenty-five is small enough that we can email every owner by name when something needs to be fixed. We mean to.
The roads not taken.
Aluminum shell, machined from billet. We had renderings. The unit economics didn't carry the first run, the lead times were two months on a quote that hadn't even returned, and we'd have shipped something we wouldn't be able to repair ourselves. The next revision can go in that direction once the basics are proven.
A custom carrier PCB. Off-the-shelf compute does what we need for the first run. A PCB is the right thing to build once you've settled which sensors and which architecture you trust. We are settling now.
On-device machine learning. We considered it, scoped it, and took it out. A purifier should be a fan that you trust, not a prediction we sell.
A subscription. We considered it for about an afternoon. Then we remembered why we were starting in the first place.
Built for the long run.
Linden is built to live with you for the long haul. The HEPA cartridge swaps when it's tired. The fan is an industrial 120 mm with a manufacturer-rated long service life — we'll quote the exact figure from the datasheet on the spec sheet. The boards inside are commonly available parts.
The product is built to work offline, without a Threadcraft Labs server in the path. We won't ship a software update that turns off a feature you paid for. Warranty terms will be written into /terms before any unit ships, and the warranty travels with the product.
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One email. Nothing else.
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