euphxenos the time consuming parts over the past month involve preparations to ship - determining which keyboards shipped to me, which box has which keyboard in it (factory will be improving how they do this for the second shipment of the early bird round), which orders can ship out (based on available inventory and the ability to fulfill someone's entire order), assigning serial numbers and determining shipping order, confirming 2,000 mailing addresses (had to send it twice because of mail delivery issues on my server - many of first emails ended up in people's junk folders), updating hundreds of order change requests and additions (making sure the additions are combined with the first orders and go to the right person when their name, address, or email are different). Also perfecting the technical aspects of order fulfillment - getting thermal labels and dot matrix packing slips to print correctly, solving technical issues with UPS, etc.
Despite detailed assembly guidelines and testing guidelines it appears that the factory did not do enough thorough testing of assembled keyboards, so I am making sure that the second batch of the first round has better QC. This has resulted in extra needed QC time for each one. Some keys have mis-assembled springs and space bars that do not work well out of the box.
The quality control process involves more than 30 steps per keyboard. 13 have shipped so far. It takes at least an hour for each one as many of the QC corrections are being encountered for the first time and I am programming each of the standard layouts. Should take less time when I know exactly how to fix each issue. This is part time for me.
Still working on the dye sub. It has taken much longer for both QC and dye sub. Today I was able to fix the final part of the dye sub control system and it appears to be working now - I will be able to continue the dye sub testing with actual keys now. One of the DC power supplies had to be swapped from a medical grade switching power supply to a linear/constant/regulated power supply.
Again for everyone I will reiterate that each keyboard will only go out after my QC process and the keyboards will take as long as they need to be done the right way. My current expectation is about six months more for all prior orders.