You may have noticed that we’re out of stock on almost everything. If you’re looking around on the site and you can’t order what you need, I’m sorry! All of the tiny robots will be back in stock soon and we’re thinking that the holiday rush has subsided and that we’ll be able to build a little inventory shortly. Just as I’m typing this, in fact, a few MOSS kits are coming off the assembly line and getting put back in stock on the site. Cubelets on Friday.

We weren’t able to manufacture as many robots as we had hoped to this year. We had to decline quite a few orders from our resellers to make sure that we had enough kits in stock for people to order on modrobotics.com, and we had to put off a relationship with two big electronics stores until next year because we just couldn’t build the sheer volume of tiny robots that they needed. We left money on the table, so to speak, and that missed opportunity hurts.

Modbot can stand the pain. Manufacturing our own products here in Boulder is hard and we’ve pushed through a lot of challenges (oh, say, bad raw materials, broken industrial machines, surprise tolerance stack craziness, plastic parts seizures by Customs, for example) that might not have presented themselves if we just had a Chinese contract manufacturer make our stuff for us like everyone else does. I’d rather we were in this position than in the opposite position of having made a lot of stuff that nobody wants to buy.

Our whole mission revolves around broad impact. Modular Robotics is all about enabling as many people as possible to experience designing with complex systems and emergence (by playing with tiny robots) as possible. And so, while we regret not being able to manufacture (and sell) as many robots as we might have been able to, I’m pleased to note that we did, in fact, make and distribute 5x as many robots as we did in 2013. And we had a lot of fun doing it! Thanks for making modbot possible.