Logistics, 3D Printing, Lasers, Manufacturing - Openviro 2026 Update

We are getting so close to finally shipping out orders of Open VRO, the open source temperature and humidity sensors built for server racks. Today, I wanted to give a quick update on progress and timeline, and show you some of the processes of getting everything ready to send out, including a look at my 3D print farm and my laser engravers logistics. It's so much fun. Welcome back to Craft Computing, everyone. As always, I'm Jeff. We'll start out with an update to the project as a whole and an introduction for those who didn't see the videos from last year. Open Virro is a sensor platform that I've been developing to improve environmental sensor implementations for businesses and homes alike. Our first product, the Open Viral AAX POE, is a rack mount PoE device designed for server racks and can run a pair of environmental monitoring sensors capable of delivering highly accurate temperature, humidity, and pressure data all over SNMP to be recorded alongside any other network sensors. The sensors themselves are built around a Bosch BME280 environmental sensor and are capable of accurate temperature monitoring to within.5° C. But the most important aspect of these sensors is actually their fidelity, recording down to 0.01° C. With such fine grain monitoring, you can see temperature changes in your environment sooner and make actionable decisions before problems develop. Anyone who's ever experienced an HVAC failure in a server room knows how quickly things can spiral out of hand. Having accurate temperature monitoring can serve as an early warning and prevent damage before it occurs. While we are a bit late getting over the finish line, I am really excited to finally get these into your hands. Anyone who's pre-ordered through our crowd supply campaign will be receiving their units over the next couple of months. And you will be able to order additional units via mouser shortly after that. Right now, we're working on getting everything assembled and ready to ship out. And while the device itself is pretty simple, it's amazing just how much work can go into shipping a retail product. So, first up, I have both the main boards and the THP probes on hand and have validated that everything is working. So, now it's just the simple task of turning a pile of PCBs, 3D printed cases, aluminum shells, endcaps, screws, and wires, and turning them into a finished product that we can ship to all of you. The first problem, though, is my 3D printed parts are still on the spools. Now, this isn't my first goound with 3D printing cases for projects before. I've just never tried to print 1,200 of something before, let alone the fact that the cases for the sensor probes are actually three individual components. So, 3600 of something. Let's head out to the garage and I'll show you what my print farm looks like right now. And so, welcome to my mini print farm. Now, I've had this Bamboo Lab P1S 3D printer for about the last 18 months, and I can confidently say it has been hands down one of the best investments I've ever made when it comes to makerpace equipment. Now, this might come as a shock, but this video is not sponsored. Though, Bamboo, feel free to drop me an email. I'd be happy to put my name behind your printers. I've been so happy with my single P1S purchase that I bought two more over the last two months. And these are all currently working on printing out all 3600 parts that I need for my temperature sensor cases. Now, I will fully admit none of these printers is in its stock configuration. While the bamboo hotend on the P1S is pretty great, I do a lot of printing with engineering filaments and filler material. Plus, a hardened steel nozzle is a good upgrade to make anyway and is more durable overall. But what's better than Bamboo Labs hardened steel nozzle? Diamondback nozzles. All three of these printers are kitted out with the 6 millm diamondback nozzle tipped with what else? Industrial diamonds. Their improved temperature control, slick surface, and complete resistance to any abrasive material makes them a literal superpower in the world of 3D printing. They are not cheap at nearly $160 per hotend, but they are by far the most reliable print heads I've ever used and give by far the most consistent results. The other slight modification I've made to all three of these printers is in the build plate itself. Going with Bamboo's own cool supertac plate. Designed for PLA and PETG, it's a smooth plate that has an ungodly binding power with filament at any temperature. If you've ever used a PEI plate, you know how well prints can stick when they're hot. But when the bed cools, they literally just pop right off. With the cool supertac plate, yeah, if you're scared of your prints lifting or warping, these are the plates for you. It is so sticky with PETG and PLA, you can remove the cold print from the plate, flip the plate over, and stick it back on. For the parts that I'm printing, specifically the temp sensor main body, warping is absolutely not acceptable. With the combination of the diamond back nozzle, the cool supertac plate along with Eligu's GFPG filament, the cases are coming out rigid and more importantly accurate. Like I mentioned, in all, I am printing 1,200 of these THP cases. With each case having three parts, so 3600 parts in total. It's going to take around 559 combined hours on all three printers to print all these parts using right around 12 kilograms of filament. The main cases again are using Eligu glass filled PETG for strength and more importantly again rigidity. The top cover is a translucent green PEDG so the LED can shine through when the sensor is powered on. There's also an internal baffle to both isolate the thermal sensor from other components and shield the screws to prevent any ESD from reaching board components. And that's printed with good old-fashioned black PLA. Right now, I'm about halfway through all of the prints being done, and I have already begun assembling some of the THP sensors, but as soon as these are all off the build plates, assembly will begin in earnest. Moving on to the main event, and this PCB right here is the brain of the whole outfit. Powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 microcontroller. This is the device that actually receives an IP address and exists on your network and can respond to SNMP queries from your monitoring software. The device itself has multiple power options, including active class one PoE supporting inputs of either 24 or 54 volts. There's also a 5.5 mm DC barrel jack supporting power from 12 to 54 volts, or you can power the device directly from the USBC port on the front. Each of these brain units supports up to two THP probes and connects via an RJ12 6P6C data cable. The base package includes one brain, one THP sensor, and one cable with a second sensor and cable available for purchase directly from Mouser. The brain being a rack mount unit intended for server racks needed to be as robust as humanly possible. So, we designed this aluminum enclosure for them to live in. We have the enclosures themselves on hand. All 700 of them have arrived and we are waiting for the final shipment of the IO shields to arrive for both front and back. Uh these right here are the final test fit validation units uh that I received late last week. The full production IO shields are basically the last major component that we're waiting on to arrive before we can ship out our final retail units. Now, the main enclosure are 6061 extruded aluminum with the IO shields being 50-52 as they're a bit easier to laser cut. Overall, I'm thrilled with the way that this thing turned out, and they should be more than sturdy enough to live their full life inside of a server rack. Now, one often overlooked aspect of building devices like this is screws. In total, for the 700 brains and 1,200 THP sensors that we have ordered, that's a total of 10,400 screws. And while one screw is basically worthless, 10,000 of them starts to add up when it comes to cost. They're a lot heavier than you might expect, too. Uh, for the brain unit, we've gone with M2.5 button head screws with a T7 Torx head on them. I personally much prefer Torx to Phillips in small devices as screwdriver bits seem to last a bit longer and have a bit more of a precision fit. Unfortunately, we couldn't find anyone who carried torque screws in the quantity and size that we needed for the THP probes. So, instead, we went with M2 counterunk Phillips screws over on these units. But back to the enclosures for the brain. While I am having the cases and the IO shields manufactured overseas, I am doing the laser engraving here in my garage cuz it's just more fun that way. Each case needs to be engraved with logos, product IDs, version numbers, and have the port labels on the IO shields. As part of my merch store, I have a 30W fiber Galvo laser that makes short work of tasks like this. Engraving all 700 cases and 1400 IO shields, believe it or not, will only take me somewhere between 4 and 6 hours in total. And it's one of the final tasks that we have to do before final assembly and shipping. So, where does that leave us for the project and for shipping? As soon as this video is published, I'll actually begin working on assembling the THP probes in full, which should be done early next week around February 17th. By that time, we should also have the final firmware ready to go, and we'll begin flashing the brain units as well. As we're still waiting on the final IO shields to arrive, we can't begin assembly on the brain units just yet. But once these do come in, that should likely only take a day or two. Even if I'm only doing this all by myself, in theory, we should be ready to box everything up and get them shipped to Crowd Supply around the first week of March with shipments going out to backers as soon as they arrive over there. This has been a very long road and you may have noticed I haven't published a video on the main channel here in the last couple of weeks. And that's because 100% of my focus has been on getting these finished up and ready to get out the door. Hopefully, as these last couple tasks wrap up, I'll be able to get a couple more videos published, as well as getting these finally shipped out to everyone. As for the firmware, as I mentioned, we will be open sourcing the firmware as soon as we begin shipping devices. As the core of the Open VRO is a Raspberry Pi RP2040, the sky is the limit for tweaks and customizations. The source code will be published on my GitHub page shortly after the devices are shipped to crowd supply, and we'll be sending out updates as soon as that happens. Thank you to everyone for backing this project as well as your patience, especially as we enter the final stretch of this very ambitious project. I can't wait for you to finally get them in your hands, installed into your own server racks. But I can promise you, they've definitely been worth the wait. I hope you enjoyed this peak behind the scenes at the logistics and monotony that goes into building a full retail product for a launch like this. As always, if you have any questions about this project, you can reach out to me at info@openvyro.com. And I will note, if you are a business looking at inquiring to work with Craft Computing, that is not the email you reach out to. I can't count the number of companies that have invited me to review their portable monitors or their vacuum cleaners or robot pool vacuums or whatever else. That is not my business contact. If you reach out to info@openvirro.com for craft computing, I will instant block you and never work with you. Be smarter than that. That's all I ask. On the plus side, having a second public email address that people can email is a really good way to eliminate the people who just scan my channel for any email address and send blindly. I have a business inquiry email address in my YouTube about page and that's the one you should be using. Rant over info at openenvirro.com for any information about this project or leave a comment down below on the comments of this YouTube video. Again, huge thanks to everyone for your support for backing this project and for your continued viewership. And as always, I'll see you in the next video. Cheers everyone. Normally open viral update videos I don't do as craft computing, but uh today I'm going to make an exception. Uh today we are drinking a Fort George brewing Java the Hop, a coffee infused IPA. Java the Hop from Fort George. Uh including using uh Crosby Estate uh Comet hops for the main hop. which Crosby is actually fairly local to me as a hop farm. Um, this is really good. The the coffee is super subtle. Think of this as an IPA first and foremost or really kind of mildly bold West Coast IPA. It's not citrusy as all. It's not citrusy at all. It is much more of that that earthy vegetital celery like uh hop profile on this which I really do like it. It's a really good springtime IPA. Now I'm going to take you on a journey here. Hold on one sec. There. right there. This little touch of coffee hits you. This super dark espresso grind just kind of kisses the top of the flavor. It's there. It's totally there. It's very, very distinct and it fades just as quickly as it enters. Uh it's a really interesting sensation uh because those are two flavors that absolutely do not belong together. I've had a number of coffee infused IPAs. Uh Rogue ALS and Spirits famously did a couple of cold brew IPAs. Uh RIP Rogue Brewing. Uh, and and they all kind of have this same characteristic to them where they're really, really good, bold IPAs and then just a subtle whisper of coffee at the back end. And the more I'm sitting here without drinking more of the IPA, the more that coffee is just kind of settling on my tongue. So, it's it's like having a really good IPA and then waiting a couple seconds and then having a real quick shot of espresso and it just sits there and lingers. I like it a lot.

For those who have been following along, or pre-ordered and Openviro Axe PoE, the wait is almost over. All of the major components have arrived, and assembly is in full swing. Today I wanted to give a quick update around the final parts, and a timeline for delivery. Thanks as always to everyone for your patience, but the wait is almost over. There's no sponsor on today's video, but if you want to help support the channel and projects like this, support me on Patreon and get access to my exclusive Discord server. Chat with myself and the other hosts on Talking Heads all week long. https://www.patreon.com/CraftComputing Grab yourself a Pint Glass at https://craftcomputing.store Follow me on Bluesky @CraftComputing.bsky.social Check out the Openviro Axe PoE over at https://www.crowdsupply.com/craft-computing/openviro-axe-poe