Again we want to thank the many of you that supported the kickstarter to give the wireless scales project a jump start. We have made some great progress so far, and here is an update on a couple of key areas of the project.

The individual wireless communication protocols have been established and development is progressing well. The next stages are incorporating these into the system level operation and designing how the many nodes operate together.

We've also been doing extensive hardware testing on the individual components, the load cells in particular. It's taken a little longer than we would have liked to get to the bottom of some of the issues, but we have made some good discoveries in recent weeks that now give us a clear path forward for the new design.

Overall, we're ticking off the technical hurdles at a good rate, but we are a little behind the original project plan. Realistically we are now looking at early November for the first shipments of the new product. We apologise for the delay.   

In the past few months several beekeepers have raised the possibility of GPS tracking for their hives purely as an added security measure. We now have an inexpensive unit available to do this and some customers are starting to use these. 

The unit can be hidden under a plastic lid, or a plastic section of an existing metal lid, and will transmit its location as soon as it has moved more than 200m, or its daily location if stationary. You can set up alerts to send you a text message or e-mail as soon as a unit is moved. And you can also log in to the secure users area of the Hivemind website to see current location and history on a map.

This functionality will also be available in the generation two hub.

If you are interested in learning more about these units get in touch with Christian via e-mail at: christian@hivemind.co.nz , or phone: +64 21 846 445.

We are delighted to introduce another new member of the expanding Hivemind / Brush Technology family. Stephen is a highly experienced software engineer and joins the team at an ideal time to boost our engineering skill set as we expand our product capability. Stephen is leading the software design and implementation of the wireless scales and generation two system.

Stephen was born and bred in South Africa and has spent the last 18 years living and working in New Zealand. Stephen joins us from Tait Communications where he was for 18 years, and was involved in a broad range of software and hardware development projects for radio communications systems. Prior to that Stephen was also involved in developing software for a range of industrial process control products.

When he is not busy designing and writing code Stephen loves sailing, tramping and plays a mean bass guitar. He is married to Cathy and they have two children.