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 in your home has more in common with a printer cartridge than with a piece of furniture you'd keep.
Linden is different.
Three production runs, in order.
Run A — One prototype
Built in the 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 out for testing in real homes. No sale. They come back, we read what they recorded, we fix what didn't work.
Run C — Ten numbered units
The first commercial run. Each one engraved with its serial — 1 of 10 through 10 of 10 — 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 workshop, a hot iron, a vacuum bag, a print farm, and one person to finish each unit by hand. Ten 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 ten 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.
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. 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.
Get on the list.
One email when the list opens.
One email. Nothing else.
Got it. We'll write when the list opens.