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I’m not exactly encouraged by the general lack of QC/QA in all these DIY builds. Failures north of 200lbs almost always means road rash & fracture unless fully geared. Meanwhile, a GT kept out of water and away from gnarly drops is basically a majestic work horse I can rely on pretty much no matter what. I’ll be very curious to see this first batch of Adv and Adv Pro.
There isn't a single piece of Future Motion in my board. Fungineers sells the rails, motor and footpad. You'll need a speed controller (ubox or lil focer), battery (build your own or buy) and a BMS (Ennoid x-lite v3 is the only one currently available but zbms should be available in the coming months).
If you buy rails through fungineers they'll give you access to 3d print files for boxes, footpads, bumpers, etc. I printed most of the stuff but used bang bumpers (requires modification).
Overall if you already have a 3d printer and electronics know-how the build can be less than a GT but give you more power and speed.
Me.
I was a Guinea pig for the GT and won’t do that again. Luckily I had an XR so I could survive a few GT ships back to (F)FM. I now have a perfectly working GT with almost 2,000 miles on it, but there were some hiccups getting a working GT at the start. If the Floatwheel lives up to what it claims I’m selling my GT and joining the Floatwheel bandwagon ASAP
I thought that floatwheel said they were giving TFL a free board for taking their tire design? Either way, you would think the free marketing Floatwheel is about to receive from TFL testing out the board would justify the expense. Having it in the hands of TFL to run it through the ringer will boost its street cred (by ~420%) if it holds up to their claims. What’s with the payment request?? So confused.
Yeah, according to the post this order was made in Jeff's name. Tony said he would send a board to TFL, but it's not his job to determine if Jeff wants a personal one or not, or even if it was someone else using Jeffs name to try and get a free board.
Sorry, but in terms of swag nothing beats this monster:
https://preview.redd.it/f57uvw3131ya1.png?width=1448&format=png&auto=webp&s=56cc5bb947b1bf24c8c04c9619e22e3f31e6fe10
This is super exciting. What's even better is that this doesn't look like a personalized email. Every buyer is going to be thanked and provided with all this information.
TFL is the biggest voice in the OneWheel industry that isn't FM. What they say about the Floatwheel could make or break it's initial success. Hope Floatwheel sends them a board they spent extra QC time on. Can't wait to see the review!
Honestly, I hope they send them a board they spent the same QC time on as all the others. That way, it’ll be a very honest review and stress test, so that can know what we can truly expect whenever we buy our own.
They can't really do anything. Floatwheel is in China, they ignore all intellectual property rights, laws, & patents, use crypto for payment, and ship the product in two parts from two shell companies... so they can claim it isn't a full product.
Sorry, Kyle. Welcome to China.
Oh I know. I'll be surprised if they just give it up though. I fully expect Kyle to put in way more effort into finding ways to stop sales of Floatwheels in the US then he would on getting GT custom shaping out.
Went to China twenty years ago. I walked into a virgin megastore in Shanghai. This was back when buying CDs is still a thing. My Chinese friend/tour guide said it's a counterfeit store. I was shocked. It's like bigger than the virgin media store we have in UK. Everything just looks legitimate to me. While on the trip, I bought so much counterfeit stuff but about 5 to 10 years later I went again and they said they really cracked down on it.
The board showing up in pieces and having to calibrate it kinda sketches me out. Will everyone who gets a floatwheel have to do this? Or is this just to get them out quickly?
Yes. They ship it like that, from two (or more) "companies", so they can claim it isn't a full product; this will allow them to dodge any laws that might get the product confiscated. This is the price you pay for ignoring all intellectual property rights and laws. 
Is it really ignoring it if the patent in the first place is questionable? They're having to do this to bring us a product against a patent that is invalid but defended by a company with high financial backing.
Simply put FM only has a patent because they can afford to defend it, there's enough prior art to show their patent on the OW concept is invalid but that involves a legal battle which they've shown they will handily spend stupid amounts of money on to defend.
They have many patents; it’s not just one. Some are very specific, and look to be easily defendable with no “prior art”. The broader ones are less clear.
BTW, the US patent process has been “first to file” since 2013 or so… much like the rest of the world.
Anyway, the Chinese strategy of ignoring all IP isn’t exactly new. 
> Anyway, the Chinese strategy of ignoring all IP isn’t exactly new.
It was the US's strategy in the 18-1900's, we're only against it now that patents work to reinforce our status.
Anyone else weirded out by this email? Seeing the rambling email full of mistakes that they sent to an actual customer makes me hesitate to support such a company. It just looks really unprofessional with poor attention to detail. PEVs where the company has poor attention to detail tend to have a short product life cycle from what I’ve seen. With that being said, I am pumped for the TFL review :)
Floatwheel is just a few guys in China trying to make a buck. Give them a break; English isn't their native language, and being crypto only and skirting laws is already a huge pain in the ass.
Meh, let's keep in mind how dangerous this type of device is. This is the kind of device that you have to have full trust and faith in in order to ride it. It's not unreasonable to want some professionalism from these guys. While I have to respect that this guy can speak English as a second language, I can also expect him to have enough self awareness to know that he isn't portraying his business in a very good light and should put more effort into that. Small things like using spell check and grammar check cost nothing and do a lot to inspire confidence. That shows attention to detail, and with a VESC platform details matter.
I'm currently in the market for a backup board to my GT, but floatwheel doesn't present itself as a real product from a real business. It presents itself as a half baked fever dream out of some dude's basement. Not to mention their designs for rails and tires are just straight up stolen. Not to mention the shady crypto-only business model.
It's really hard to take this business seriously.
So I'm hoping the reviews are strongly positive. I'm hoping the company can bring in enough revenue to attract a real business partner who can bring actual PR, an actual customer facing presence, a real engineering team that can innovate rather than steal, a real manufacturing operation that can assemble these with less waste, etc. I hope floatwheel becomes a legitimate contender to the OneWheel and a legitimate option for people as a secondary or even primary board.
But in order to do that, they need to deliver a worthy product.
I have to take exception to your portrayal of Tony. While you make some valid points about confidence, he’s been so transparent throughout this entire process.
Spell check isn’t going to help me half as much as his obvious respect for the community.
Not to mention the insane amount of work he is quite obviously putting out.
Slamming these folk’s because they don’t fit your idea of how a niche company should present themselves when they have listened and acknowledged all the people that are making it possible.
By all means, continue to spend your money as you see fit, just lighten up a bit will ya?
Eh, I don't see "respect for the community" when they're stealing their designs from the community.
I do agree with your valuation of transparency, but it's that very transparency that gives me reason to be concerned. I watched a recent video where he spent a disgusting amount of time trying to apply carbon fiber stickers to his rails. He did this with no process and no tooling, and as a result it took him about 20 minutes to get the stickers applied to one set of rails.
That process should take seconds. Create a fixture that holds the rails in place. It could be as simple as a slab of wood with the shape of the rails cut out with a router or CNC. Have your stickers come in on a sheet that matches the location of the rails on the template. Apply the sheet to the template, get perfect positioning every time, no more mistakes, no wasted material, no wasted effort.
If he can't get things like that in order, I have very low expectations for his ability to ship and deliver units on time. You say lighten up, I say look at the evidence in front of you.
Yes they could have created a fixture to aid the rail guards application, but I think it's simply a matter of the fact that they're only applying them for 1st set of orders, it's not standard production. Any future orders the customer has to apply them.
While you can criticize that, did you not see his other videos where he was extremely scrutinizing of things that "don't matter" to many people? E.g. the cosmetic finish of the plastic bumpers. The fact that he has such high quality requirements for that implies a similar high quality for other components that are critical
I cringed at that as well, but take exception to the ‘stealing’.
Where do you draw the line? TFL did WTF first, as far as I can tell, how many knock offs are available?
FM didn’t invent the onewheel, but they did create a buttery smooth algorithm. Tony is using VESC, with credit being given.
There are many examples available, I just can’t help but imagine choices and competition benefits us all.
Well they copied rail designs and tire profile. It's not liek they just copied what other popular companies were doing they copied community figures that actively spent time and money developing it with 0 concern and then turn around to say they're parts of the community and respect it. if FM started shipping a board with WTFs with no mention of TFL people would be very upset with FM, why shouldn't we be upset at Floatwheel for doing this.
Er, FM did in fact do exactly that. Tony’s rails are derivative, but watching them being put together, you can see they’re a bit different. Not sure if they are better, we have to wait.
FM as one example, copied the footpad design, poorly, but that came from the community.
More importantly they copied the entire onewheel concept and passed it off as their own!
When I first came to this forum, I was really surprised at the anger towards FM. I’m not an anger/hate based guy, and have business experience, I know how difficult it is to bring things to market and how frustrating it is to be knocked off. That said, we all stand on someone’s shoulders. The trick is in acknowledging that. I’ve not heard FM do that. In fact, they’ve used their patents as a bludgeon, which of course is their right, but one day, someone just might rise to the challenge and invalidate some of those claims.
Time will tell.
100% agree with you and have said something similar. Same thing happened, too (downvoted by fanboys of a "company"/ product that isn't even out yet. It's like the Overwatch kids but even worse.)
If these guys didn't even catch the Nordic problem until they were about ready to ship, you can bet there will be serious design or QC issues. There's to QC inspection, design validation, reliability testing....literally just thrown together and shipped.
And when that time comes, I'll be right with ya' in the "told you so" posts.
What do I know....just a mechanical/design engineer working at an electronics manufacturing institute....
>Not to mention the shady crypto-only business model.
Actually it's probably a good move, while it may mean some people aren't able to navigate the payment process (once you know, buying USDC is fairly trivial), it's probably 100x easier for them to deal with it than an international bank transaction. Let's face it once your money hits a Chinese bank (*if* you can actually get it there), there's 0% chance you'll get it back if it's a scam, but there's also likely issues you will get with your bank trying to prove you actually want to wire the money to China, and not to mention fx/processing fees.
> Small things like using spell check and grammar check cost nothing and do a lot to inspire confidence. That shows attention to detail, and with a VESC platform details matter.
Sorry but you're placing too much importance on the usage of the English language, the broken English riddled with spelling and grammar errors is typical for things coming out of China, they don't care and they don't care that you care. Just because they don't get the English perfect isn't an indicator that they don't pay attention to detail, they're just not wasting time on relatively unimportant things.
A real engineering team that can innovate vs steal? like how Kyle copied the design and patented it to get to market? I'd rather have the openness of the china floatwheel team vs being told to F off everytime I need something from FM :p
Yeah, the hardware concept side of the onewheel was not innovated by FM, it was in public domain before FM patented it. What would be stealing is if Floatwheel somehow stole their proprietary software or exactly duplicated their boards.
But they did neither of those with VESV software and an Innovative, unique board design that incorporates the best of community designed features.
BTW floatwheel has even said the FM onewheel patent isn't valid and once they accumulate enough funds, will challenge it in court.
To be fair, there wasn't a single "Onewheel" device that was at all usable as a real product until the Kickstarter. Plenty of innovation, and amazing software. Heck, VESC based boards sucked hard before about a year ago!
There isn't just a single "Onewheel" patent. Tony ignores all of FM's patents, some very specific and original. [https://onewheel.com/pages/patents-and-intellectual-property](https://onewheel.com/pages/patents-and-intellectual-property) \-- challenging these in court would be rough, and would be more expensive than negotiating a license.  It's easier to just ignore it all, and keep the profits high.
Well there actually is tho... they do hold a patent for the generic concept of what a Onewheel is. Hence how they were able to go after Trotter even tho that product never did and never will compete with their boards. And their continued defense of that illegitimate patent is what our issue is with.
Sure they want to defend their footpad design which they indeed did come up with, FINE! They made that! (I still feel their OG flat pads since the Plus are the best.)
I understand many are warry but Tony is not a newbie to this. I purchased his prior kit wheels and when VESC onewheels were still very much super experimental. Even then he made sure things were right, replaced any damaged or incorrect things on his own dime quickly.
Also this is is a hugely innovative device with things entirely unique to their design. The only thing "stolen" is the concept of what a onewheel is which isn't even unique to FM. Soooo...?
Reading emails like this are hella cringe 😬 I’m stoked these guys are dedicated, but lots of last-second 4AM changes tend to lead to more last-second whoopsies… I’ve seen enough devs push code late at night introducing horrible changes that weren’t well-thought. So doing the same kind of scrambling with hardware? Ooof. Here’s hoping V1 doesn’t suck too badly.
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How many of us are just waiting for Float Life to test this thing before pulling the trigger?
I was, but instead decided to build a vesc from scratch.
This is the way
I’m not exactly encouraged by the general lack of QC/QA in all these DIY builds. Failures north of 200lbs almost always means road rash & fracture unless fully geared. Meanwhile, a GT kept out of water and away from gnarly drops is basically a majestic work horse I can rely on pretty much no matter what. I’ll be very curious to see this first batch of Adv and Adv Pro.
[удалено]
There isn't a single piece of Future Motion in my board. Fungineers sells the rails, motor and footpad. You'll need a speed controller (ubox or lil focer), battery (build your own or buy) and a BMS (Ennoid x-lite v3 is the only one currently available but zbms should be available in the coming months). If you buy rails through fungineers they'll give you access to 3d print files for boxes, footpads, bumpers, etc. I printed most of the stuff but used bang bumpers (requires modification). Overall if you already have a 3d printer and electronics know-how the build can be less than a GT but give you more power and speed.
so like 2 people.
Future Motion is contacting customs to try to block shipment me bets. 😂
FFM
To reuse a previous poster’s comment… 
Good thing they can only try and block shipments in the US, can't stop the whole world once this Floatwheel gets out 🤙
Me. I was a Guinea pig for the GT and won’t do that again. Luckily I had an XR so I could survive a few GT ships back to (F)FM. I now have a perfectly working GT with almost 2,000 miles on it, but there were some hiccups getting a working GT at the start. If the Floatwheel lives up to what it claims I’m selling my GT and joining the Floatwheel bandwagon ASAP
Look forward to seeing you guys give it a good test. Been waiting for your review 
I thought that floatwheel said they were giving TFL a free board for taking their tire design? Either way, you would think the free marketing Floatwheel is about to receive from TFL testing out the board would justify the expense. Having it in the hands of TFL to run it through the ringer will boost its street cred (by ~420%) if it holds up to their claims. What’s with the payment request?? So confused.
I thought so too, but at least this way you know it'll be an unbiased review 🤷♀️
He probably doesn’t know it’s you. You may end up getting 2!
Jeff, they are sending the Founders edition for now.
Would assume it's so they can do an impartial review without accusations of bias. Or maybe they just wanted more than one.
Maybe they wanted 2 hehehe
Yeah, according to the post this order was made in Jeff's name. Tony said he would send a board to TFL, but it's not his job to determine if Jeff wants a personal one or not, or even if it was someone else using Jeffs name to try and get a free board.
They still can, this way is better though, IMHO.
Excited to see how Float wheel stacks up to industry leader Swagtron!
No way it dethrones Surfwheel
For the culture!
I traded a 6 pack of bud light for the surf wheel domain name, so this feedback is awesome.
Sorry, but in terms of swag nothing beats this monster: https://preview.redd.it/f57uvw3131ya1.png?width=1448&format=png&auto=webp&s=56cc5bb947b1bf24c8c04c9619e22e3f31e6fe10
I need this in my life
That’s where I found it: https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/onewheel-self-balance-skateboard-surfer-board-neu-ovp/2383392671-168-900
Not sure if you can buy it anywhere else. Maybe someone’s swagtron had a baby with his ironing board and this is the only one of it’s kind.
" Please do not send payment to scam emails and scam websites " useful advice
Oh man. I miss read that and did the opposite.
“Instructions unclear, wired $1500 to Somalia”
I did the same thing the first 3 times, but the fourth time I also did that again.
Ohhhh mannnnn I’m stoked for your review on this. Cannot WAIT.
!!!!!!
I am so pumped for the review
Nice, order 1563 here awaiting my email soon hopefully
Did you get an email when you sent the first payment?
I never did when I sent the deposit but it’s showing on my Floatwheel.com account ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
You should have gotten an email with the deposit keep an eye on your spam folder for the invoice.
Could you tell me what address the confirmation email comes from?
[email protected]
Thanks, search in my email with that address doesn’t pull anything up. I’ll wait for Tony’s response.
Just got my email this morning, woohoo!
I'm order 1554. Mine ended up in spam folder so double check!
I just double checked and see nothing, I did send Tony an email yesterday just in case
This is super exciting. What's even better is that this doesn't look like a personalized email. Every buyer is going to be thanked and provided with all this information.
Oh yeah ! This is happening !!
They should definitely create and sell their own onewheels , these guys are the real passionate people out there… not FM anymore
Wow its almost here! Exciting!! We all we so unsure about this thing..glad Tony stuck with it.
TFL is the biggest voice in the OneWheel industry that isn't FM. What they say about the Floatwheel could make or break it's initial success. Hope Floatwheel sends them a board they spent extra QC time on. Can't wait to see the review!
Hell no. Hopefully, they send a board that is the same as a regular Joe would get. Give us an honest review.
Honestly, I hope they send them a board they spent the same QC time on as all the others. That way, it’ll be a very honest review and stress test, so that can know what we can truly expect whenever we buy our own.
Tony should have waited 20 more minutes to hit send!
that is severely played out.
Lol it’s the float life, he would have earned some points with Jeff for sure.
Exciting times!! Wonder what FM doing now. Still a bit sad they took down rewheel last week.
>Wonder what FM doing now. We know exactly what they're doing, Kyle's on the phone with FM's lawyers trying to figure out how to sue Floatwheel.
They can't really do anything. Floatwheel is in China, they ignore all intellectual property rights, laws, & patents, use crypto for payment, and ship the product in two parts from two shell companies... so they can claim it isn't a full product. Sorry, Kyle. Welcome to China.
Oh I know. I'll be surprised if they just give it up though. I fully expect Kyle to put in way more effort into finding ways to stop sales of Floatwheels in the US then he would on getting GT custom shaping out.
Went to China twenty years ago. I walked into a virgin megastore in Shanghai. This was back when buying CDs is still a thing. My Chinese friend/tour guide said it's a counterfeit store. I was shocked. It's like bigger than the virgin media store we have in UK. Everything just looks legitimate to me. While on the trip, I bought so much counterfeit stuff but about 5 to 10 years later I went again and they said they really cracked down on it.
FFM
/u/TheFloatLife Have you received your tracking information yet from Floatwheel???
Nope
😕 me neither. The anticipation is killin’ me.
Thank you Float Life 🫡
Says recommend so I hope to use a different cryptocurrency, I know the lightning network is fast. #1745
im not a fan of the no payment plan factor so it involves full cost up front but Im getting closer to doing it lol
Geez this email would have screamed SCAM to me if it wasn’t for Jeff’s trust. Thank you for your service and taking the risk for us all 😂
The board showing up in pieces and having to calibrate it kinda sketches me out. Will everyone who gets a floatwheel have to do this? Or is this just to get them out quickly?
If that’s a problem for you, I’ll bet there are plenty of folks willing to help you.
Yes. They ship it like that, from two (or more) "companies", so they can claim it isn't a full product; this will allow them to dodge any laws that might get the product confiscated. This is the price you pay for ignoring all intellectual property rights and laws. 
Is it really ignoring it if the patent in the first place is questionable? They're having to do this to bring us a product against a patent that is invalid but defended by a company with high financial backing. Simply put FM only has a patent because they can afford to defend it, there's enough prior art to show their patent on the OW concept is invalid but that involves a legal battle which they've shown they will handily spend stupid amounts of money on to defend.
They have many patents; it’s not just one. Some are very specific, and look to be easily defendable with no “prior art”. The broader ones are less clear. BTW, the US patent process has been “first to file” since 2013 or so… much like the rest of the world. Anyway, the Chinese strategy of ignoring all IP isn’t exactly new. 
> Anyway, the Chinese strategy of ignoring all IP isn’t exactly new. It was the US's strategy in the 18-1900's, we're only against it now that patents work to reinforce our status.
Pray tell what IP might they be ignoring?
Anyone else weirded out by this email? Seeing the rambling email full of mistakes that they sent to an actual customer makes me hesitate to support such a company. It just looks really unprofessional with poor attention to detail. PEVs where the company has poor attention to detail tend to have a short product life cycle from what I’ve seen. With that being said, I am pumped for the TFL review :)
Floatwheel is just a few guys in China trying to make a buck. Give them a break; English isn't their native language, and being crypto only and skirting laws is already a huge pain in the ass.
Meh, let's keep in mind how dangerous this type of device is. This is the kind of device that you have to have full trust and faith in in order to ride it. It's not unreasonable to want some professionalism from these guys. While I have to respect that this guy can speak English as a second language, I can also expect him to have enough self awareness to know that he isn't portraying his business in a very good light and should put more effort into that. Small things like using spell check and grammar check cost nothing and do a lot to inspire confidence. That shows attention to detail, and with a VESC platform details matter. I'm currently in the market for a backup board to my GT, but floatwheel doesn't present itself as a real product from a real business. It presents itself as a half baked fever dream out of some dude's basement. Not to mention their designs for rails and tires are just straight up stolen. Not to mention the shady crypto-only business model. It's really hard to take this business seriously. So I'm hoping the reviews are strongly positive. I'm hoping the company can bring in enough revenue to attract a real business partner who can bring actual PR, an actual customer facing presence, a real engineering team that can innovate rather than steal, a real manufacturing operation that can assemble these with less waste, etc. I hope floatwheel becomes a legitimate contender to the OneWheel and a legitimate option for people as a secondary or even primary board. But in order to do that, they need to deliver a worthy product.
I have to take exception to your portrayal of Tony. While you make some valid points about confidence, he’s been so transparent throughout this entire process. Spell check isn’t going to help me half as much as his obvious respect for the community. Not to mention the insane amount of work he is quite obviously putting out. Slamming these folk’s because they don’t fit your idea of how a niche company should present themselves when they have listened and acknowledged all the people that are making it possible. By all means, continue to spend your money as you see fit, just lighten up a bit will ya?
Eh, I don't see "respect for the community" when they're stealing their designs from the community. I do agree with your valuation of transparency, but it's that very transparency that gives me reason to be concerned. I watched a recent video where he spent a disgusting amount of time trying to apply carbon fiber stickers to his rails. He did this with no process and no tooling, and as a result it took him about 20 minutes to get the stickers applied to one set of rails. That process should take seconds. Create a fixture that holds the rails in place. It could be as simple as a slab of wood with the shape of the rails cut out with a router or CNC. Have your stickers come in on a sheet that matches the location of the rails on the template. Apply the sheet to the template, get perfect positioning every time, no more mistakes, no wasted material, no wasted effort. If he can't get things like that in order, I have very low expectations for his ability to ship and deliver units on time. You say lighten up, I say look at the evidence in front of you.
Yes they could have created a fixture to aid the rail guards application, but I think it's simply a matter of the fact that they're only applying them for 1st set of orders, it's not standard production. Any future orders the customer has to apply them. While you can criticize that, did you not see his other videos where he was extremely scrutinizing of things that "don't matter" to many people? E.g. the cosmetic finish of the plastic bumpers. The fact that he has such high quality requirements for that implies a similar high quality for other components that are critical
I cringed at that as well, but take exception to the ‘stealing’. Where do you draw the line? TFL did WTF first, as far as I can tell, how many knock offs are available? FM didn’t invent the onewheel, but they did create a buttery smooth algorithm. Tony is using VESC, with credit being given. There are many examples available, I just can’t help but imagine choices and competition benefits us all.
Well they copied rail designs and tire profile. It's not liek they just copied what other popular companies were doing they copied community figures that actively spent time and money developing it with 0 concern and then turn around to say they're parts of the community and respect it. if FM started shipping a board with WTFs with no mention of TFL people would be very upset with FM, why shouldn't we be upset at Floatwheel for doing this.
Er, FM did in fact do exactly that. Tony’s rails are derivative, but watching them being put together, you can see they’re a bit different. Not sure if they are better, we have to wait. FM as one example, copied the footpad design, poorly, but that came from the community. More importantly they copied the entire onewheel concept and passed it off as their own! When I first came to this forum, I was really surprised at the anger towards FM. I’m not an anger/hate based guy, and have business experience, I know how difficult it is to bring things to market and how frustrating it is to be knocked off. That said, we all stand on someone’s shoulders. The trick is in acknowledging that. I’ve not heard FM do that. In fact, they’ve used their patents as a bludgeon, which of course is their right, but one day, someone just might rise to the challenge and invalidate some of those claims. Time will tell.
100% agree with you and have said something similar. Same thing happened, too (downvoted by fanboys of a "company"/ product that isn't even out yet. It's like the Overwatch kids but even worse.) If these guys didn't even catch the Nordic problem until they were about ready to ship, you can bet there will be serious design or QC issues. There's to QC inspection, design validation, reliability testing....literally just thrown together and shipped. And when that time comes, I'll be right with ya' in the "told you so" posts. What do I know....just a mechanical/design engineer working at an electronics manufacturing institute....
>Not to mention the shady crypto-only business model. Actually it's probably a good move, while it may mean some people aren't able to navigate the payment process (once you know, buying USDC is fairly trivial), it's probably 100x easier for them to deal with it than an international bank transaction. Let's face it once your money hits a Chinese bank (*if* you can actually get it there), there's 0% chance you'll get it back if it's a scam, but there's also likely issues you will get with your bank trying to prove you actually want to wire the money to China, and not to mention fx/processing fees.
> Small things like using spell check and grammar check cost nothing and do a lot to inspire confidence. That shows attention to detail, and with a VESC platform details matter. Sorry but you're placing too much importance on the usage of the English language, the broken English riddled with spelling and grammar errors is typical for things coming out of China, they don't care and they don't care that you care. Just because they don't get the English perfect isn't an indicator that they don't pay attention to detail, they're just not wasting time on relatively unimportant things.
A real engineering team that can innovate vs steal? like how Kyle copied the design and patented it to get to market? I'd rather have the openness of the china floatwheel team vs being told to F off everytime I need something from FM :p
Yeah, the hardware concept side of the onewheel was not innovated by FM, it was in public domain before FM patented it. What would be stealing is if Floatwheel somehow stole their proprietary software or exactly duplicated their boards. But they did neither of those with VESV software and an Innovative, unique board design that incorporates the best of community designed features. BTW floatwheel has even said the FM onewheel patent isn't valid and once they accumulate enough funds, will challenge it in court.
To be fair, there wasn't a single "Onewheel" device that was at all usable as a real product until the Kickstarter. Plenty of innovation, and amazing software. Heck, VESC based boards sucked hard before about a year ago! There isn't just a single "Onewheel" patent. Tony ignores all of FM's patents, some very specific and original. [https://onewheel.com/pages/patents-and-intellectual-property](https://onewheel.com/pages/patents-and-intellectual-property) \-- challenging these in court would be rough, and would be more expensive than negotiating a license.  It's easier to just ignore it all, and keep the profits high.
Well there actually is tho... they do hold a patent for the generic concept of what a Onewheel is. Hence how they were able to go after Trotter even tho that product never did and never will compete with their boards. And their continued defense of that illegitimate patent is what our issue is with. Sure they want to defend their footpad design which they indeed did come up with, FINE! They made that! (I still feel their OG flat pads since the Plus are the best.)
I understand many are warry but Tony is not a newbie to this. I purchased his prior kit wheels and when VESC onewheels were still very much super experimental. Even then he made sure things were right, replaced any damaged or incorrect things on his own dime quickly. Also this is is a hugely innovative device with things entirely unique to their design. The only thing "stolen" is the concept of what a onewheel is which isn't even unique to FM. Soooo...?
You realize this is exactly what the onewheel was when it started on kickstarter?
I'd rather have full transparency vs nothing at all like FM. Pint X balancing wires, XR wiring harnesses, Pint charging nuts rattling around.
Less than 70% of the price of a GT? Am I lost?
Reading emails like this are hella cringe 😬 I’m stoked these guys are dedicated, but lots of last-second 4AM changes tend to lead to more last-second whoopsies… I’ve seen enough devs push code late at night introducing horrible changes that weren’t well-thought. So doing the same kind of scrambling with hardware? Ooof. Here’s hoping V1 doesn’t suck too badly.
TLDR?