Hi goTenna Team,
In reference to the new Mesh products and the approximately 2,500 faulty ones you received from your contract manufacturer which added another couple of months of delay for backers (including myself), what will become of them? There were a lot of ideas sent in. What have you all decided?
Thank you.
-AndyM
Hey Andy we replied to this question on Kickstarter so copying the answer here:
"All those extra units will actually be reworked (later on) thanks to a new SDK one of our chip manufacturers put out to fix a defect in their own chip’s code. We’re just putting them out to later so we don’t delay manufacturing. In other words with this fix the battery issue will no longer be a problem – we just need time to integrate the chip’s SDK fix into our own firmware!
(That doesn’t mean we won’t come up with something else based on the ideas everyone shared when we discussed having 2500 units we wouldn’t be able to have achieve spec battery life. Indeed we’ve already instituted relay mode into the devices you’re all getting now!)"
Daniela,
Thank you for the answer. I missed the significance of that update on Kickstarter.
-Andy
By the way, I ordered 2 extra Mesh units to be dedicated Relays. Doing my part to help others.
-Andy
That’s awesome! Relay nodes are going to be so key and we’re so excited the community is itself driving this forward. Cool fact: over 50% of all Kickstarter & gotenna.com pre-orders for goTenna Mesh include more than 2 units meaning there’s a good chance people are ordering enough to set up as statiomary relay nodes. 
By the way, for anyone who isn’t aware of what “faulty production boards” relate to, this is from a private June 2 backer update to our Kickstarter supporters where we had noted that we thought we had an issue with the first 2500 circuit boards we made for commercial production. In that backer update I asked the community to tell me what we should do with these otherwise-perfect boards that seemed to just have poor battery life. The majority of respondents said we should sell them for less (or give them away) to folks to use as stationary always-powered-on relay nodes.
The good news is that it turns out the issue can be resolved with an SDK fix one of our chip vendors put out to fix an issue in their own code, BUT the conversation this issue started before we knew there was going to be a fix for this inspired us to 1) recreate imeshyou.com and add stationary node relay specificity to the Network Map and 2) improve out-of-the-box stationary relay mode (i.e. mesh without a phone) functionality into the goTenna Mesh devices you all are getting.
Indeed, we’re hoping that in next firmware/app release we can fit in enhanced functionality which allows you to turn any goTenna Mesh that’s already been paired to a phone to an unpaired relay node with a simple touch of the button. (Today FYI if you want to turn an already-paired Mesh device into a stationary relay node you have to unpair it from the phone via the app and basically reset the device to new which is a little more annoying that it needs to be – but we’re workin’ on it!)