See I don't understand why the confidence trickster needs to maintain confidence. He's got the money. Refunds are entirely optional on his part. He could basically walk away tomorrow and never reply.
Bernie Madoff most certainly gave refunds. It's part of the documented history against the guy.
Bernie Madoff most certainly gave refunds. It's part of the documented history against the guy.Are you talking about refunds, or the promised investment returns. The investment returns payment were all part of the scam to get even more money invested - he had to religiously pay the returns he had promised. Money has been recovered but I thought that was only money recovered under legal threat or by the liquidator and from assets seized by prosecutors. Only half of 17.3 billion dollars has been recovered. He fabricated 65 Billion dollars of profits. Now that is a scam.
In the case of Mu Optics, the fundraising campaign is complete. If PayPal is retaining some money, we do not know how much. It sounds odd that PayPal would retain money - I do not understand that bit at all.
I can see no reason to fabricate the role and actions of PayPal other than to lull backers into a false sense of security about the safety of their money. And the only reason they would do that is to prevent people demanding refunds or thinking it's a sham.
Apparently it does look like Paypal has started holding onto Indiegogo campaign money:
http://www.develop-online.net/news/43946/Paypal-witholds-Skullgirls-funding
It sounds like PayPal went to the company involved and ask if they were good to refund all the money if there were callbacks. They said no - that is why they needed the money from the campaign - they don't have the money. Paypal then froze the account until a Consumer Financial Complaint Bureau complaint was filed against them.
"Please keep in mind that PayPal continues to hold back a considerable amount of money until such time as we can show them that all the processes and parts and orders, and POs, etc. are in place to begin delivering the product."
I believe that statement to be an outright fabrication.
I believe that statement to be an outright fabrication. As I said in an earlier post, PayPal's only concern is chargebacks and making sure that they get paid. They do not achieve this by inspecting companies and making judgements about the likelihood of delivery of product.
If they just showed a blank prototype PCB, even for an old sensor, it would tell us a LOT about whether or not they are serious with the hardware.
...but they haven't.It would also tell everyone a LOT about the design.
When we see a PCB, we can work out a lot, and a big problem these guys have is if they can make an IR camera cheaply, there will be a lot of people who can do it 500% better. The moment they post a picture of the PCB, people on this list will be working out a lot about the design. From the pin count, visible traces from pins, clock connections, etc, it may even be possible to work out the micro family, the WiFi chip, the IR sensor. They may as well post the circuit and parts list. You seriously think they could post the PCB photo and not have it analyzed online here in the forum?
Isn't it the truth that if they show a picture of a PCB that shows no details, they will be slammed in this forum for not showing a decent HiRes picture? It could be a picture of any PCB.
If they actually succeed, how long do you think they can sell the camera's for until they are undercut by Chinese-made cameras?
If amazingly they have actually used an original concept in this design. they most definitely shouldn't give away even the smallest clues until they start to ship the product.
They have been accused here of being scammers, liars, frauds - you name it. I don't see why they should add "unbelievably stupid" to the list by showing their PCB at this time or at they time they actually have a genuine first revision prototype PCB.
Bernie Madoff most certainly gave refunds. It's part of the documented history against the guy.He had to religiously pay the returns he had promised.
To Lexy,
The MLX90614 sensor is fine for a IR thermometer. Its response time is not fast enough in my opinion for an imager. The datasheet suggests the fast settling time is 0.04 seconds.
To build a 120 x 160 image (19,200 pixels)
19,200 x 0.04 = 768 seconds (12.8 minutes)
The other challenge is that if you arrange the optics so that the sensor was looking at the entire DLP array and you only turned on one pixel worth of mirrors, you would only get 1/19200 of the thermal energy image hitting the sensor. The rest of the sensor would be measuring whatever the other mirrors were pointing at.
Jay_Diddy_B
For those wondering about the focus issue (not that important compared to the TI detector IMHO) you may be interested to hear that all of my Fire Brigade TIC's are fixed focus 1m to infinity using a 25mm multi element Germanium lens structure. They are no good for looking at PCB's unless you fit a lens in front of them like I detailed earlier.
Hello All,
I thought I’d share with you a few pieces of hardware and manufacturing news.
On the hardware end, I’m happy to be able to say that we’ve settled on a microcontroller from Atmel, the Sam3x. This 84MHz MCU is the brains of the imager, it drives the image sensor and the communications equipment. We’ve been using this chip since early in the development cycle and trust it to be able to give great performance in the camera.
We also have a wireless chipset from RedPine Signals that enables realtime wireless video from the imager to your smartphone or computer. It’s been very fun adding wireless and we think that we have a few more tweaks we can implement to get some added functionality out of it.
We’re narrowing down our assembly options(there have been a lot of potential manufacturers) and for our electronics and pcb manufacturing, our current top contenders are “Advanced Circuits” and “American Standard Circuits”. Both great companies.
As we work to get the case and body of the imager finalized, we have come up with a few slight modifications to the body that we are currently considering. If those ideas go anywhere, I’ll try to post pictures of the possible changes down the road.
As always, Thanks for all of your support. We can’t wait to get the first imagers into your hands and see what uses you come up with. (I personally really want to see someone mount one to a quadcopter drone).
Cheers,
-Charles and the MuOptics Team.
That's an old update, here is the latest:QuoteHello All,
I thought I’d share with you a few pieces of hardware and manufacturing news.
On the hardware end, I’m happy to be able to say that we’ve settled on a microcontroller from Atmel, the Sam3x. This 84MHz MCU is the brains of the imager, it drives the image sensor and the communications equipment. We’ve been using this chip since early in the development cycle and trust it to be able to give great performance in the camera.
We also have a wireless chipset from RedPine Signals that enables realtime wireless video from the imager to your smartphone or computer. It’s been very fun adding wireless and we think that we have a few more tweaks we can implement to get some added functionality out of it.
We’re narrowing down our assembly options(there have been a lot of potential manufacturers) and for our electronics and pcb manufacturing, our current top contenders are “Advanced Circuits” and “American Standard Circuits”. Both great companies.
As we work to get the case and body of the imager finalized, we have come up with a few slight modifications to the body that we are currently considering. If those ideas go anywhere, I’ll try to post pictures of the possible changes down the road.
As always, Thanks for all of your support. We can’t wait to get the first imagers into your hands and see what uses you come up with. (I personally really want to see someone mount one to a quadcopter drone).
Cheers,
-Charles and the MuOptics Team.
Once again, they talk about their development cycle and infer prototypes, but continue to still not show them.
They sold these things for $125 (early birds) to $150 (the rest). Depending on which version of the Sam3x chip they are using, that represents around 10% of the ENTIRE cost of the camera, JUST FOR THAT ONE CHIP!
I bet the PCB will be at least $5-10. The housing will be another $5-10. Assembly will be $10-15 easy, or more. All the passives and connectors and associated simpleparts on the board will be another $10-15. So you're looking at $35 to $50 before you've spent a penny on the imager or lens, or packaging, or *labor*, or shipping.
I do a ton of product design and manufacturing. To turn a profit, your parts cost should be about 1/10th of your retail price.
That means the Mu guys have between $13 and $40 to spend on parts. If they are already into this for a $10 MCU, $5 PCB, $10 assembly, $5 housing, $10 worth of connectors and passives - there is no money left for the imager or lens!
And I can't be the only one thinking "wait, if they got the price down because some new imager technology had come out that they had to sign an NDA for ... how can they still do the product claiming that company is no longer going to be a supplier, but ANOTHER company has a similar cheap imager that has been on the market for years?".