It’s been a busy couple of months here, but it’s exciting to announce that I’ve started a company, Noktura ApS, with a co-founder to start selling OWLs and OWL components from Denmark.
All designs will still be open souce once they are finalised, and similar to Prusa, Framework Laptops and comma.ai we’ll sell certified, production grade hardware/kits to improve accessibility, but you can also build your own. OWL2.0 will still be supported and those driver boards will still be available from us or my brother. Software will be the same across all of them.
Purchasing an OWL
The pricing for the OWL3.0 itself is 6500 DKK (excl. VAT) (approx. 1000 USD, 880 EUR or 1500 AUD) or 8500 DKK (excl. VAT) when including the Hailo AI module. We’ll also be selling in kits (of various lengths) which include:
- Teltonika router + QuWireless antenna
- Industrial M12 ethernet switches (1000 Mbps)
- Cables
- OWL Powerbox
- Stainless mounts
We’re limiting the first batch to 100 OWLs, so if you’re interested confirm your order using this form, and we’ll email you an official quote. You’ll also have the opportunity to book a meeting with us and we can learn a bit more about your story, use case and expectations. Would recommend getting your order in fairly soon.
This is an entirely bootstrapped company, so we’ll use a pre-order system to support the ordering of parts at scale. Working with a batch size of 100 makes it much more affordable, though inherently riskier for ordering larger quantities. We hope to scale this further in the future and improve the design towards mass production (e.g. diecast over machined etc).
Production
We have suppliers locked in for the enclosure (Lithuania), PCB (still my brother in the UK) and mounts (Lithuania), with all the other parts sourced as needed. Shortages of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 (CM5) and some smaller PCB components are making this a little challenging. The RAM shortages are also impacting the price considerably. We’re still locking in prices for the kits.
We expect shipping to start in December based on current lead times from manufacturers.
A company founded on an open-source vision is something I’ve wanted to set up for a long time (effectively since I started the OWL), so it’s really exciting to have it finally running. It will be challenging, as hardware always is, but I am keen to test the idea that open-source is the way forward and one that benefits both the tech users and the company itself. Having a company behind this project makes it much more sustainable in the long term as well, so we can really build some cool technology that supports farmer driven innovation and share that with all of you.
Always open to chat if you have questions/comments/suggestions. Email is: guy[at]noktura.tech. Feel free to get in touch and schedule a meeting.
For those who filled out the original expression of interest on openweedlocator.org, we should have already reached out to you in some form, or if not let me know. It seems our emails may have been landing in spam/trash.
Cheers,
Guy