Smoothieboards unreliable - what new controller to support?

[bubbasnow]

what about that Chinese bbp thingy?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/11 ... escription

[geneb]

It appears that this vendor is selling them for $49 each:
http://www.replikeo.com/en/electronics/ ... board.html

The vendor was linked in the page that mhackney pasted in about the Duet.

I'm very tempted at that price...

g.

[KAS]

It appears that this vendor is selling them for $49 each:
http://www.replikeo.com/en/electronics/ ... board.html

The vendor was linked in the page that mhackney pasted in about the Duet.

I'm very tempted at that price...

g.

The Duet 0.85 cost a bit more, but might be worth the difference: http://blog.think3dprint3d.com/2015/08/ ... n-085.html

I also like the PanelDue option for the controller. https://miscsolutions.wordpress.com/paneldue/

[IMBoring25]

Looks like a v0.6 clone.

[geneb]

Ah, ok.

g.

[arthurwolf]

As detailed in this thread, I bought two Smoothieboard 5XCs, and one of them arrived with two capacitors improperly soldered. One fell off the board on its own, and the other was so poorly soldered that it peeled off with almost no effort. The other capacitors were all solidly connected, so I know this isn't just an issue with a flimsy component.

We fully test the boards before shipping ( we have automated testing of all functions ), and we visually inspect them. For Uberclock that is done entirely in the US by a professional.
I haven't heard of caps falling off since the very first beta batch a few years back. I guess it could still happen today that they got improperly soldered ( production is *never* perfect, no matter where it's done ), which would be an extremely rare occurrence, but likely the shipping/travel also contributed ( they were definitely fine before shipping, we make sure ).

Fragile caps is one of the only, and very rare issues that can still slip through the process, it's insanely rare, and we replace the boards.

I'm not sure how this is that much of an issue. We have very very strict testing/inspecting, we have worked a lot on the production line, and most important, we replace problematic boards.
I personally ( for RobotSeed, the Europe side of the operation ) have not had to replace a single board for several months ( i think ), and we ship a lot of them.

You were just unlucky here, there is no reason to generalize to all of Smoothiedom, or get upset.

I like the community and the firmware, but firmware is nothing without hardware to run it on, and in my opinion their hardware platform is a joke - a really bad one, played at the user's expense. They know that their hardware manufacturing process is broken. They know that their quality control process is broken,

It is not, a single occurence doesn't mean anything here by itself.

We worked an insane amount on this, we want people to be happy with their boards.

and that as a result, they're shipping out boards with parts literally hanging off them.

There are very rare occurences of bad reflow that cause weak caps, they are very hard to catch, and it probably fell of during shipping.

I understand how you might think QC is broken if you imagine we ship boards with caps that have fallen off, but we don't. Really.

To make matters worse, Uberclock, their US distributor, has ignored two emails I sent about this issue over the last month.

Uberclock has had some trouble this summer, which caused a lot of email backlog, and they are working on getting things back to normal.

In the meantime, I ( for RobotSeed, in Europe ) can replace your board if you want. You'd know this if you had contacted the Smoothie community about this.

Just give me your shipping address at [email protected], I'll ship you a replacement board, and you can ship the broken board to Uberclock any time you want.

We don't often have broken boards, but the few people that have had them can testify that we do replace them.

I now have to go to my credit card issuer, and file a dispute to get my money back. The defective board is a slap in the face, and the lack of support from Uberclock is also a slap in the face. I am so disappointed in whoever is doing the hardware manufacturing, and Uberclock? I straight up don't like that company. I didn't do all this work, FOR FREE, just to be treated like crap -

We gave 30 free boards to contributors this year. How is that for treating contributors like crap ...

Uberclock is a two-person company, making very little profit, selling *and designing* open-hardware and an open-source firmware, that ran into trouble, and is working on catching on. There was no ill intent towards you, we love our contributors, as we have showed *many many times*.

and if this is how they treat a contributor like me, why would a regular end user want to have anything to do with them? They have dropped the ball here, and they're watching it bounce away while they still take money for these damned things.

Our customers are very happy.
I think you are over-reacting.

I'm also not a big fan of the old cell phone processor they use. It has 64K, but it's segmented into three areas (32+16+16).

It was the most powerful microcontroller that was popular in the open-hardware crowd back when we started the project. Now we are working on Smoothie v2, which has a LPC4337, and a FPGA on the pro board. We are moving forward, no reason to complain about this.

That required me to spend several days migrating memory from one bus to another. On top of that, they're already feeling the pinch - only a few K are free under normal operating conditions. If you have an LCD panel, you have to turn it off to run the calibration section of my firmware. That's not a good user experience. They are working on a new platform with an Intel Edison chip that will have exponentially more RAM - but who's gonna manufacture it? The same people that ship boards with capacitors falling off? Thanks, I'll pass.

We don't ship boards with fallen off capacitors. Shipping can be pretty traumatic for a board. We have extremely low failure rate on the boards we ship, you were unlucky.

Cheers.

[KAS]

Not that it matters much now but there has been a few with issues with build quality and lack of response. It might be a small sample overall, but it's a higher percentage on this forums.

http://forum.seemecnc.com/viewtopic.php?f=82&t=8249

[arthurwolf]

Not that it matters much now but there has been a few with issues with build quality and lack of response. It might be a small sample overall, but it's a higher percentage on this forums.

http://forum.seemecnc.com/viewtopic.php?f=82&t=8249

How did that story end ? Did you end up with a working board and panel in the end ?

The massive deltabot group order was the beginning of the trouble for Uberclock. They'll get back on their feet, and they are commited to making their customers happy.

[KAS]

Yes, mainly because I had two boards to reference and able to solder the caps. Those boards were part of the group purchase.

Everything is fine now on both boards and haven't had any issues except a burn't MOSFET that I was able to replace with ease.

[Generic Default]

While we're on the subject, I'm just wondering how everyone here connects to their smoothieboards and runs prints.

What software do you use, what version of the software?

Have you been able to print without keeping the USB connected?


It's always been a PITA for me to connect each time, and now that I have a new computer I can't do it at all. Tried with mattercontrol and three different versions of repetier host. I can't get pronterface to run. Are there any other programs that can control a 3d printer over a USB?

[bubbasnow]

While we're on the subject, I'm just wondering how everyone here connects to their smoothieboards and runs prints.

What software do you use, what version of the software?

Have you been able to print without keeping the USB connected?


It's always been a PITA for me to connect each time, and now that I have a new computer I can't do it at all. Tried with mattercontrol and three different versions of repetier host. I can't get pronterface to run. Are there any other programs that can control a 3d printer over a USB?

i got octopi/octoprint up and running to push gcode to it

[critical_limit]

I´m using Pronterface on a Mac without problems, but most of the time I´m using the Webinterface to control and send gCode. Printing files from SD-Card.

Due to 626Pilot´s Problems with Uberclock I´m changing over to Duet 0.85 with DuePanel. Not responding to complaints about bad Hardware they sold its a nogo for me and I´m following 626Pilot on that road. Smoothieware Firmware is heigh Level and have to give all my respect to Arthur. But if the Hardware is bad and nobody feels responsible for that, sorry.

I´m running 2 smoothieboards actually and have 2 in the drawer. They will be all sold and I´m going with the Duet.
David Crocker is a smart guy answering all my questions about his Z-Probe-Board. Board has arrived few days ago and looking very good. Short test on the Rostock Max gave repeatable accuracy of 1-2 steps while probing. But had no time to complete the installation and build a proper mount for the board. Will be continued in October when I finished my job in Israel and have time for my Projects waiting in the drawer.
Have read a lot in german Forums about him and his Delta-Fork of the original RepRap-Firmware. Impressive. Most interesting thing will be the segment-free movement calculation and the embedded 7-factor auto calibration.

Due to high workload actually I will start building a new Delta in October and installing a Duet in the Rostock Max as well as soon as the 2 ordered Duet Boards will arrive.

Will post my results here

cheers
Dirk

[forrie]

On win 7 I can run repetier, and protoface no worries on my smoothie. Protoface does some strange things sometimes so I tend to stick with repetier.

[arthurwolf]

Due to 626Pilot´s Problems with Uberclock I´m changing over to Duet 0.85 with DuePanel. Not responding to complaints about bad Hardware they sold its a nogo for me and I´m following 626Pilot on that road.

I responded here as soon as I was made aware of this post. I would have caught this problem sooner if 626Pilot had contacted the Smoothie community about this.

As I said : in case of problems ( which is very rare ) we *always* exchange the board ( after figuring out what exactly is the problem, and sometimes if the user is proficient enough, and the fix is easy, suggesting they try the fix themselves, as it saves time for everybody ). It doesn't happen often, and customer feedback tells us we are much more willing, and much faster, to exchange boards, provide support, and fix problems, than what is common.

We are *very* small companies ( Uberclock in the US, RobotSeed in Europe ), working way more than if we had "normal" jobs ( this is what we do as our day job *and* during our free time, and then some ), trying to do our best to advance the Smoothie project, and Open-Hardware in general.
So yes, when you do that much, and you hit a problem, you don't have any "free time" to compensate for it, and it can result in accumulating backlog of emails, and being late on restocking/deliveries etc. That is what has happened to Uberclock, and they are getting close to getting back to normal.

We did enormous amounts of work on the firmware for free before even starting to sell boards, we still do that work today ( even though we are not the only ones selling boards, we are the only ones actively contributing to the firmware and the documentation ), we provide enormous amount of support, via email and the community channels, *and* we are working on the next generation of both hardware and firmware ... And we do all this under Open-Source licenses. All that has *got* to buy us some good will ...

The only problem here, is Uberclock is several weeks late on it's email, and working very hard on getting back on track. In the meantime, anyone with a problem can contact either me directly at [email protected] or RobotSeed, and I can assure you they will, as they always have in the past, get satisfactory answers.

[bvandiepenbos]

I have (2) smoothie boards and have not had any issues with quality.

I think you all should give uberclock a break and be a bit more patient. I know how hard it is to keep up with responding to email.

kudos to arthur /robotseed for your willingness to replace the boards!
thank you, you made some good valid points and shared helpful information.

[mhackney]

Brian and all, I also run a small business as you know - http://www.eclecticangler.com - so I know it can be a challenge. But not once in 6 years of operation have I ever not responded to a customer in a timely manner. In the 2 instances where I was actually out of the country for 3 days, I immediately sent a response and explained that I was out of the country. I've NEVER had a customer send me 2 or more request emails for help. My philosophy is, if you don't have the time, energy or patience to put the customer first, you probably should not be in business. I've had my spikes in sales too and it is difficult to navigate through. But, communication with customers is #1 priority. People will understand if you are up front and honest "we had a big spike in sales and it is going to take an extra X days to get your order out. As a thank you for your patience, I'm including an ABC." That's all it takes.

I think the issue here is more one of lack of communication, although 2 boards with problem capacitors is indicative of a quality control or design issue. Come clean, fix it, respond honestly and punctually and you will build a business and customer base that will support and promote you. It works.

It is good that Arthur is willing to send replacements from Europe. But that is just broken in my opinion. If he can't communicate with Uberclock and get them to send replacements, find a new supplier in the US. Or, simply buck up and communicate with customers. If getting dug out of a backlog issue is the reason, customers will understand if they are told.

That said, I have 5 smoothie boards. My first one from early 2014 had gremlins. The community and Umber Clock did support me and communicated at an appropriate level. I'm running 3 now with no issues for any of them. The other 2 will go into future printers.

[arthurwolf]

Brian and all, I also run a small business as you know - http://www.eclecticangler.com - so I know it can be a challenge. But not once in 6 years of operation have I ever not responded to a customer in a timely manner.

That's how it's been since the beginning for both RobotSeed and Uberclock, until recent problems on Uberclock's side.
I'm sure as a somebody who runs a small business, you can imagine some circumstances in which you could become temporarily unable to handle all the responsibilities your company requires.
I'll let Uberclock say what's going on when they get back on track, but they are working on doing so, and are also implementing ways to make sure this doesn't happen again.

In the 2 instances where I was actually out of the country for 3 days, I immediately sent a response and explained that I was out of the country. I've NEVER had a customer send me 2 or more request emails for help. My philosophy is, if you don't have the time, energy or patience to put the customer first, you probably should not be in business.

We do not put anything before our customers.
I do not think a temporary problem is reason enough to completely stop something that has been overwhelmingly praised by customers.

I've had my spikes in sales too and it is difficult to navigate through.

The spike in sales is only a small part of the issues they have been facing. Obviously if they had been able to communicate better with their customers they would have.

We love our community.

It is good that Arthur is willing to send replacements from Europe. But that is just broken in my opinion. If he can't communicate with Uberclock and get them to send replacements, find a new supplier in the US.

I probably wouldn't send the board from Europe, Uberclock can still send boards, that's a separate part of the business that hasn't had as much trouble.

Cheers.

[0110-m-p]

I'm also not a big fan of the old cell phone processor they use. It has 64K, but it's segmented into three areas (32+16+16).

It was the most powerful microcontroller that was popular in the open-hardware crowd back when we started the project. Now we are working on Smoothie v2, which has a LPC4337, and a FPGA on the pro board. We are moving forward, no reason to complain about this.

Arthur, any update on the V2 Pro board? I'm in the process of designing a new machine that could really take advantage of this board and have my fingers crossed that it is finished in time.

[bot]

It sounds like v2 is at least a year away, from what I have heard.

[arthurwolf]

It sounds like v2 is at least a year away, from what I have heard.

We are not giving any deadline for this project ( because last time we did, we got people upset by not meeting it ).

What I can say is, we have v2-pro proto boards soldered, we are working on the v2-non-pro design, and have started working on the new firmware.

How fast we go is going to depend a lot on how much help we get from the community. We are already planning on giving boards away to people ready to help with programming the v2 firmware.

[626Pilot]

I'm not sure how this is that much of an issue.

Our customers are very happy.

I think you are over-reacting.

You were just unlucky here, there is no reason to generalize to all of Smoothiedom, or get upset.

This thread didn't make it to the end of the first page before someone else chimed in about the same problem with Uberclock. Then again, on page 2. There is word elsewhere on the forums that there have been quality issues with Smoothieboards ever since there was a large buy. As for getting upset, I think that's a normal response when you've been 1) shipped a bad board, 2) ignored by the seller, and now 3) told "it's not a big deal" and "there is no reason to [...] get upset" by the guy whose site sends people to this vendor, while he knows full well their after-sale support is functionally non-existent. To be fair, maybe you personally are not responsible for the Smoothieware site sending people there. However, if you're here as a representative of the Smoothie team, I'm looking straight at you and saying, "Your site sent me to a vendor that sold me a lemon - when you knew full well, by your own admission, that they aren't answering their own email."

I don't want to bust your chops about this, Arthur. You have been very helpful to me on IRC when I had questions about coding for Smoothie. However, I strongly believe that this grievance of mine is legitimate. I believe it's completely fair for me to point these things out.

In the meantime, I ( for RobotSeed, in Europe ) can replace your board if you want.

It's kind of you to offer to clean up Uberclock's mess. I don't develop for Smoothie anymore, so I don't have a particular use for it.

You'd know this if you had contacted the Smoothie community about this.

I contacted your vendor - the one your site sent me to, the one who I actually did business with - not once, but twice. I gave them a HUGE amount of time to respond. That satisfies due diligence on my end. Also, there is an ambiguity in your statement that I don't like. It looks like you COULD be trying to insinuate that some share of the blame should rest on my shoulders. That stings. I'm the guy who got shafted, not you.

Uberclock is a two-person company, making very little profit, selling *and designing* open-hardware and an open-source firmware, that ran into trouble, and is working on catching on. There was no ill intent towards you, we love our contributors, as we have showed *many many times*.

What's the intent behind sending people to a vendor when you know they're so besieged that they can't answer their own emails for over a month? How do you not know that's a ticking time bomb?

I have (2) smoothie boards and have not had any issues with quality.

I think you all should give uberclock a break and be a bit more patient. I know how hard it is to keep up with responding to email.

kudos to arthur /robotseed for your willingness to replace the boards!
thank you, you made some good valid points and shared helpful information.

I also know what it's like to run a business that becomes "the victim of its own success." I still say it's horsefeathers to let a customer go un-answered for a month. When I had a business partner who was lackadaisical with the customers, do you know what I did? I bought him out of the company so that he couldn't make me look bad anymore!!!

It sounds like v2 is at least a year away, from what I have heard.

I would assume so. I would rather see the firmware (which is great) ported to hardware that exists now, but I get the impression that the Smoothie ecosystem is fed by revenue from board sales.

[626Pilot]

Due to 626Pilot´s Problems with Uberclock I´m changing over to Duet 0.85 with DuePanel.

I haven't decided whether to go the BeagleBone or Duet route. They both have advantages and drawbacks. I am leaning a little more towards the Duet because the codebase is less complicated than MachineKit, and also because I like the PanelDue. However, the specs are much lower, and therefore less future-proof. Hard to say. I'd wind up adding more tunable parameters to whatever 3DP control software I pick up - neither tunes as many as my code does. RepRapFirmware (behind the Duet) has segmentless motion control and something vaguely similar to my algorithm.

[arthurwolf]

As for getting upset, I think that's a normal response when you've been 1) shipped a bad board, 2) ignored by the seller,

You have *not* been ignored by the seller. The seller has been unable to handle email recently. Those are two extremely different things.
If I had access to their email box, this would never have happened, and nobody would have noticed a thing. We are working on making sure this doesn't happen again.

Also, there is a difference between "you have been shipped a bad board by a careless person that saw the board was bad and shipped it anyway", and "very rarely a board has a defect so hard to detect it can slip the QC process, ship, and get broken during shipping, in which case the board is exchanged for a new one".

and now 3) told "it's not a big deal" and "there is no reason to [...] get upset" by the guy whose site sends people to this vendor

What I was trying to say is you are making this out to be more than it really is.
Uberclock has been very good at answering customers before the recent problems, and their QC *is* very good.

You have been *unlucky* ! That's what I mean when I say you shouldn't get upset at Uberclock : you got a bad board, which is very rare, and didn't get an answer, which is a recent and *temporary* problem that will be resolved soon.

Generalizing your personal experience to "their QC is broken" and "they ignore customers" is simply not true, it is unfair and it is not justified.
The exact same thing could possibly one day happen to one of my customers, and it wouldn't mean my company's QC or support is broken overall ... It'd mean I run a fragile business, out of passion, and it's harder to get over road-bumps for me than it is for Google.

*There is no company* that *never* ships a bad board. No QC process is perfect. Ours is very good ( it's even better if you take into account the sort of company that is doing it ). We fully test the boards ( which many sellers do not ) *and* do visual inspection. And we work very hard on making sure they are produced properly.
You are one of the rare persons that got a bad board. When that happens, which ( again ) is very rare, we *replace* the board ( and with many other companies, getting them to do that is just hell. In our case we just replace straight away ).

I can not prove to you that our QC process is good, or that we have been very good at answering emails ( before Uberclock's recent problems ). I have no way of proving that to you. I know it's true, I can't do anything if you decide not to trust me on this.

All I can tell you is we get overwhelmingly positive feedback from our customers, and the community, and that we work *extremely hard* at making sure everything works fine.

We are not Amazon. We are single-point-of-failure very small businesses, and like most open-hardware sellers, we barely make enough money to keep doing what we love, and that is advancing Open-Hardware, and helping the community. You know that when you get a board from us. Please be patient and we *will* get your problem resolved, we ALWAYS HAVE and always will. We *WANT* to !

Please do not take a rare and temporary problem, and generalize it to saying things are worse than they really are.

I apologize ( Uberclock and Robotseed are sister companies, we design and produce things together, so I can apologize for them ) for not answering your email, and for sending you a bad board. We can exchange the board, or pay you back, any time you want. And we are working very hard on making our QC and support processes even better than they are now.

, while he knows full well their after-sale support is functionally non-existent. To be fair, maybe you personally are not responsible for the Smoothieware site sending people there. However, if you're here as a representative of the Smoothie team, I'm looking straight at you and saying, "Your site sent me to a vendor that sold me a lemon - when you knew full well, by your own admission, that they aren't answering their own email."

And because the problem is temporary, I do not see this as as much of a problem as you obviously see it.

It's a difficult time for Uberclock, they will get out of it soon, and go back to being exemplary. I think giving away as much as they do to the community earns them a chance to be forgiven for this. I know most people will ...

It's kind of you to offer to clean up Uberclock's mess. I don't develop for Smoothie anymore, so I don't have a particular use for it.

So you want to get your money back instead ? That's fine too, just answer my email and we can get that under way very fast.

You'd know this if you had contacted the Smoothie community about this.

I contacted your vendor - the one your site sent me to, the one who I actually did business with - not once, but twice. I gave them a HUGE amount of time to respond. That satisfies due diligence on my end. Also, there is an ambiguity in your statement that I don't like. It looks like you COULD be trying to insinuate that some share of the blame should rest on my shoulders. That stings. I'm the guy who got shafted, not you.

That's absolutely not what I was saying.
Again, try to put things into context before assuming we are being mean ( like you did when you assumed you were being ignored instead of giving Uberclock the benefit of the doubt ) : we do open-hardware ( ie we give away all of our work for chinese cloners to steal our work and release closed-source derivatives and ruin us. because we care more about the community than we do about making a living ), we are nice guys, we love our community, we want everybody to be happy and to be friends, and hack all the things together, with daisies and rainbows and smiles. Don't be mad at us.

I was trying to say that Uberclock's problem so far has not affected many people, because most of the time they will go to the community for help, and I will start helping them from there ( like I stated doing as soon as I was made aware of this post ).
Bad boards are extremely rare, so really Uberclock's lack of answering emails hasn't had that much impact overall ( I caught two other persons that were unable to contact Uberclock for board problems, in both case they just needed help, there was no defect ).

You were *unlucky*. And now we want to do everything it takes to make you happy, like we do for all of our customers.

What's the intent behind sending people to a vendor when you know they're so besieged

Email backlog is not the only problem or they'd be able to catch up much quicker.

that they can't answer their own emails for over a month? How do you not know that's a ticking time bomb?

Because I know what the problem is, and what they are doing to fix it.

I also know what it's like to run a business that becomes "the victim of its own success." I still say it's horsefeathers to let a customer go un-answered for a month. When I had a business partner who was lackadaisical with the customers, do you know what I did? I bought him out of the company so that he couldn't make me look bad anymore!!!

Yeah except there's a big difference between somebody sucking at their job, and somebody being really great at their job and say, getting sick for a period of time.
Uberclock has been very good at what they do for a long time. Give them the time to get back on their feet. If they don't, then you can bash them.

[KAS]

I'm guessing that [email protected] forwards to [email protected]. Every email I sent to uberclock.com had a reply from gmail.com

From reading between the lines above, It sounds like uberclock has underlying issues more so than just email.


Either way, hope all is well and normalcy underway.

[626Pilot]

As for getting upset, I think that's a normal response when you've been 1) shipped a bad board, 2) ignored by the seller,

You have *not* been ignored by the seller. The seller has been unable to handle email recently. Those are two extremely different things.

There is no functional difference from my perspective. I expect you to resolve your internal problems internally, just like my customers and creditors expect that of me.

Please understand how this looks to a customer, particularly one who makes a living from 3D printing. The guy is sick? The guy is too busy? I sympathize, but it literally doesn't matter whether I sympathize or not. Business is, of necessity, done at arm's length; therefore, my sympathy (or lack thereof) has no bearing on any business decision I have to make. For me, walking away from Smoothie is a business decision. If I tell a customer I'll get 30 pieces shipped by Tuesday, and I fail to do so, they aren't going to give a hoot about some company called "Uber... clock, was it?" that they never heard of before. They will probably think I'm trying to cover for my own ineptitude, and get mad at me, because now they may not be able to deliver on their promises, because of something I failed to deliver. Whether they get mad at me or not, they'll think twice about ordering from me in the future, because they don't want to keep me as a vendor if it means putting their own obligations at risk. Likewise, when the bills come due, my creditors won't care about Uberclock either. They will care that I made an agreement to pay, in ink, and then failed to deliver. My hard-assedness is a reflection of the realities I face with those who I've made agreements with. Because I can't trade on sympathy for Uberclock with those who I must trade with, I just can't do anything with that sympathy.

OK, OK. Complaining is only useful up to a point. Maybe you wonder what I think should've been done differently.

Your site, before sending people to Uberclock, could mention that their support email is swamped due to a surge in orders (or however you want to phrase it), and provide alternatives that ship to the US if possible. Maybe that wouldn't make Uberclock look very good, but as you can see from this thread, that's still better than letting people find out the hard way. Uberclock's site could've warned me about that backlog before I ordered from them, or at the very least, in conjunction with the email address. If these things were done, you would both be setting reasonable expectations.

It might also help to include a small card with each order stating where to go for support. If Uberclock is answering support emails like "how do I set steps/mm in config'', and that stuff is stopping them from attending to their core business (hardware), I don't think they should be doing that. It would not be efficient for the people asking how to config their printers, so it's not worth doing in the first place, let alone whether it's jamming up the support queue for returns.

To address the immediate crisis, I would redirect their support email to someone else. If I understand you correctly, you're doing something along those lines, if not that exactly. That's good. It demonstrates adaptability.

*There is no company* that *never* ships a bad board. No QC process is perfect. Ours is very good ( it's even better if you take into account the sort of company that is doing it ). We fully test the boards ( which many sellers do not ) *and* do visual inspection. And we work very hard on making sure they are produced properly.

I'll grant you that. Since the recurring problem is capacitors not being soldered properly, maybe the visual inspection should include nudging all of them to make sure they don't peel off. When they're soldered properly, they don't budge at all, so there should be little worry of unnecessarily damaging good boards.

What I was trying to say is you are making this out to be more than it really is. Uberclock has been very good at answering customers before the recent problems, and their QC *is* very good. You have been *unlucky* ! That's what I mean when I say you shouldn't get upset at Uberclock

Telling me not to get upset after being ignored... okay... FUNCTIONALLY ignored... for a month... that isn't reasonable. Understand that you're spending goodwill to buy time, and that goodwill is an exhaustible resource. Someone knowing that things are so stuffed up that gaps in support of this magnitude are happening, and then going on to sell the boards anyway, with no warning, is doing something wrong in my opinion. Such a person is setting reasonable expectations, and then violating them. That's toxic. I think you should do whatever you can to put a stop to it as quickly as possible. I'm not from Mars or anything, so it stands to reason that I'm not the only person who will think this way after having such an experience.

I remember watching a movie called Grand Budapest. Came out last year, I think. The main character is talking to his protege, and he tells him that people get angry because they think their needs won't be met; and furthermore, that his job is to anticipate those needs "before they are needed." I don't think people even can get mad without sensing, on some level, that their needs will not be met in some way. One of the very first things I learned about customer service is that you have to set reasonable expectations, meet those expectations, and refresh your customers so that they know you aren't shining them on. If you or Uberclock or anyone sets a customer up for disappointment, and that disappointment inevitably comes, don't tell the customer they're wrong to be mad. Don't tell them, "it's okay, you're the exception," when it was within your power to warn them. You can't buy time with goodwill and expect the goodwill to still be there afterwards. That puts responsibility where it doesn't belong.