Hi there!

Don't miss the hopeful news at the end -- and you can help! But let's start with the good news.  We're aiming to have a low-cost version of Hivemind out in a few months.  And I mean low-cost.  At this stage we're aiming at half-price.

We have sourced a lower-cost satellite transmitter that will enable us to reduce purchase cost significantly. It's a different product than our original top-of-the-line solution. It will be slightly less flexible and may support fewer scales, but on the other hand, it will actually have better GPS accuracy and complete theft tracking!

The bad news is that some of you have had trouble with our scale connectors.  We want to alert you to this ask you to take care when plugging them in.

Make sure the arrows line up!  Don't force the connectors when you plug them in. As you will see in the photos below, there's a right and a wrong way to plug in the connectors.  It actually takes quite a bit of force to plug them in the wrong way, but some have still managed it.  If you don't line up the arrows, you'll damage the connector and water will get in causing the ugly result you see in the right-hand image (and it will also stop working).

Wireless scales is an impressive development we'd really love to do, but we'll need your help. Making this go wireless will:

• Remove all cabling issues when moving hives
• Solve the waterproofing issues some of you have had with cables.
• Prevent cable trouble with cattle
• Allow monitoring of hive clusters in pollination
• Simplify our already-simple installation

We may even be able to make this development work with the low-cost version (that would be impressive!): we aim to go both lower cost and wireless.

But we need your help. At this stage we only want you to reply with a "Yes, we'd love to see low-cost Hivemind with wireless scales!" If we get enough interest we'll go ahead with the project and open up pre-orders.