Dear Backers, 

Thank you so much for your continued support! To be worthy of the support of our subscribers, our team continues to work with incredible dedication, pursuing the goal of providing superior TARO products. 

Now we finally completed the molding process that has been a critical path on our production schedule for many months. 

Additionally, after we changed the RAM chip and revised the design of the IC board of the M1, we were successful in eliminating communication issues between the two principal components. The components are now communicating and working together extremely well, even when undergoing tests in a heavy workload environment. 

Recently, we also tested and approved the PCB samples. This means that the PCB production is ready to start.

Thanks to the continuing encouragement and support of our subscribers, we are now only one step away from the trial production. Please see the photos of IC boards below as well as the included video to see how the IC board of IR wristband is made. ( Click to see the video) 

While we continue to push forward towards final production, we also just filmed a new marketing video for the TARO products. Since the beginning of the Kickstarter campaign, our earliest prototype TARO has continued to evolve and has become more of an automated AI filming robot. So, we made this new video to keep all backers updated on the evolution of the product.

Thanks again!  

Taro Team

Dear backers,  

So many thanks for your support to TARO! We have begun plastic molding process to push the production schedule, and the assembling procedures are ready to start.  

After several rounds of negotiation, the IC manufacturer agreed to offer us a rebate for the IC components so we could lower the cost a little bit.  

To express our gratitude and apology to all backers, we decide to send an extra IR wristband to our backers as a gift. 

Meanwhile, for backers who already ordered 2 wristbands, we will refund the amount of money for one wristband. 

So by having a pair of IR wristbands on each arm, every backer could easily film and constantly keep the target in the frame whether in the complex background or fierce rotating environments, helping you to capture more precious, stunning moments for extreme sports, field trip and etc. 

In the full workload test of our IC board, we sadly found out that our RAM and main chip would have a communication problem when working on full speed, this is because we are pushing too far on the RAM’s limitation, so we have to change the RAM, unlucky this would result in a big change on the IC design and could lead to the delay in the production schedule for 20 days. Here’s the newest production schedule. So sorry about that! After it ends, we will fight to win the time back.

Thanks again!  

Taro Team

Dear backers,

So much appreciated for your constant support! We have begun plastic molding last weekend and begun the process of checking the assembling procedures step by step. With the help of our supplier, we are more confident about the quality now. During these days, we demanded more harsh lab tests circuit tests for the IR wristband and the tracking module, they all went well.

We did notice that we are a little behind schedule, it majorly because that we spent more time on testing than we planned, however, considering it is very important to the final product, we feel worthwhile, we will fight hard to win the time back.

Thanks again! 

Taro Team

Dear backers,  

Since the last update, we received lots of encouraging comments. We’re so grateful that you choose to stay with us along the way. We will try best to keep dedicating on the production schedule, to deliver you a satisfying product. The optimized SOC board has arrived this week, and it’s now being tested by our experts, after several rounds of procedures, we would soon see how it empowers Taro strongly.

After the longtime discussion, finally, we work out a production schedule which we would hardly push together with all suppliers and researchers. To request backers’ demands, we list the whole timeline of production, so you could have a clear grasp of the progress and arrange your own schedule reasonably. Please check this chart below.

 Sincerely, thanks again, see you soon!  

Taro Team

Dear Taro Backers! 

I am Hao, founder of TARO, after 5 days trip to Shenzhen, China, I am back to our office now. There is a super good news to announce: after countless times of meetings and negotiations, we have successfully finished the selection process of all our suppliers, which means that TARO finally steps on the takeoff runway.

Here I want to say sorry, sorry for keep you waiting, but I would more wish to say thank you, thank you for standing with us from zero to today, and thank you for saving us many many times, even at the moment you don't realize. I could finally begin to tell the long story now:

Inventing something is hard, and inventing a new hardware for a group AI software geeks would be very close to a mission impossible.

On Oct. 2017 when we 3D printed our first prototype of TARO, we thought that we are just one step away from the final product, so we launched our KS campaign, and thanks to all your support, we successfully completed our campaign, and went through to the actual product test phase, at the beginning, we even believe that we could deliver the product before our promise date, however, the real world quickly welcomed us by a big slap.

In our KS page, we promised the tracking distance would be 20 meters, which we believe would be the perfect distance for most of the games and sports, however, I have to confess now, we did not do enough tests at that moment, so when we actually do that, we found out that, TARO fails, not a little, but totally fails on 20 meters tracking.

At the beginning, we didn't take this as a serious problem, because we believed that by simply increasing the power of our tracking tag, we would just fix it, however, when we really did that, we sadly found out that if we increased the power to the value which is good enough for our old tracking algorithm, our tracking tag would be hot enough to burn the egg after 5 minutes work. Then we tried every small change we could think about, and all of them failed, which left us with only one choice: redo all the designs and algorithms, in a word, DO IT AGAIN, remember this word. This is the most horrible word our whole team could imagine, and the even worse news is that we have to hear it again and again in the coming 10 months.

At that point, our team had a discussion, should we follow the old design and deliver something that only works for around 8 meters and don't postpone the schedule? After a long discussion, we all agreed that 20 meters would be very important to our backers since we had already received their support, it would be too shame for us to admit that we could only deliver them something that is not perfect. So, we decided to DO IT AGAIN.

This is the decision that dragged us to a 3-months' battle to the algorithm, I don't want to get to the details, but I clearly remember the night of Dec. 2017, just before we set off to the CES. At that night, as usual, we worked overnight, and after trying out all the possible ways we could think of at that moment, we found out that, we are totally exhausted. We could not even figure out a new way to meet our target. Our chief programmer, recked helplessly on the chair and asked: Hao, shall we just give up and refund the money? We had done our best, and it is not possible.

I don't know how to answer, and I opened our KS page, and scroll down all the comments, then I answered: There are too many backers there, the job of writing all the canceling emails is too tough to do. Maybe we could have some more tries.

So, we stayed, all because of you.

After this talk, we spend another 3 weeks on all the possible solutions, we failed many many times, and luckily, we finally found out a way to solve the problem. And, after achieving a series of very positive testing results for this new algorithm. We feel released and even believe that if we push the supply chain hard enough we could still meet the delivery date.

And it turns out to be the beginning of another series of nightmares.

Our new algorithm is much more complex than the old one, so we need to choose a new chip to carry all the calculation job. We roughly estimated our needs and chose a nice chip from our online supplier, the price is very expensive but still in our budget, so we happily begin the process of embedded development, to be honest, as a group of AI software engineers, embedded development is something that we learnt in school but not used for many years, so our team simply re-read all the books and cases and to secure the process, we even hired an out-source team to help us on the details in case that we are not familiar with all details.

After 3 weeks of peaceful coding job, we successfully coded our new algorithm on the chip, and the PCB design also arrived on time, so after one week of waiting on the SMT job, we are ready to do the test. This is where the nightmare begins: the new algorithm to too heavy, it requires too much calculation and thus cause very high power consumption, our battery would easily run out of juice in half an hour, OK, here comes to our promise again, we promised to you, we would last for 2 hours. And the even sad problem is that the chip is very very hot after continues working for 20 minutes, it even requires a radiating system. Those 2 big changes made our whole set of industrial design to go to the trash bin.

And it is after we start to do TARO, that we realized that a whole set of industrial design is not only the structure of the product, but also the container case, the outbox, and even the process of assembly, which spent us over 2 months to complete, and because of the chip problem, guess what, we need to DO IT AGAIN!!!!!

Part of our industrial design job is outsourced, and since we want to meet the delivery date, we pushed them really hard, actually they warned us many times about the uncertainty of our project and suggested us many times to begin the industrial design only after we confirmed our IC part, however, we have a delivery date to meet, so we ignored all their suggestions and pushed them really hard on all the related jobs. So, I guess you could imagine, what is their feedback when we tell them this three magic words: DO IT AGAIN, to be honest, I very appreciate that they let us walking out the meeting room instead of lying down.

OK, I don't want to recall the memory of that chaos period, "nightmare" is the most vivid word I could choose.

After 2 weeks of refining, the new set of design is almost ready, new outlook, new battery, new box, everything seems to be perfect except one: the chip. We first get this chip from an online supplier, because they are the quickest source to deliver. And when we began the process of production, we turned to the official supplier of the chip, and the price we got there was almost triple the price we have online. We were super angry and believe that the official supplier was trying to blackmail us, so we tried hard to find another supplier and even found a friend in the chip company, but all the price we got was almost the same. So we naturally doubt why we could have such a cheap price online? After a long meeting, we understood that what we got at the beginning was a second-hand chip, which had no quality insurance and no stable supply, and we came back and verified, Yes, it was a second-hand chip, and we were very lucky that it didn't break in our tests.

So..... we were facing this big problem again, we need to change the chip because it is too expensive to afford and in order to change the chip, we have to change our algorithm, and we have to change our IC design, and again we had to face our industrial design outsourcer and let them help us to redo the design. It is a big mess! After the exhausting work for more than a year, we are back to the starting point now, it is not one thing or two things we need to redo, we need to DO THE WHOLE THING AGAIN.

I don't remember very clearly how I explained this to everyone, but I do remember most of the conversation closed with something like this: We had to do this because the backers are waiting, they have waited for months, we have to deliver it.

We feel extreme graceful for everyone in our team and everyone in our out-source team, after hearing our promise to the backers, they all understand and fully supported us. We have done projects many times, before TARO, every time when we faced such a severe fail, we have to quit.

But we stayed this time, all because of your support.

Because this time we are not doing some cool geek projects, we are carrying the trust of all our backers, you chose to support us just via our promotion video and just through our KS page, you didn't actually know us, but you chose to believe in us, so we could not quit this time. It is not only our project now, it is the project we own with our backers.

After that, we chose another affordable chip from the official supplier and greatly simplified our algorithm, it was very lucky that after this simplify process, our performance had not dropped but even increased, however, even after simplifying, it would still take over 240% of the chip's calculation capability if we follow the standard way of embedded development coding. So our embedded coder has to work sentence by sentence to dig the possible room for saving calculation capability, and lucky we did it.

So here comes to today, that we finalized all our design and stepping on the pre-production phase. We know that what you care about is the delivery date. But to make this date very accurate, we need to collect the feedback from all our suppliers, which might take 2 weeks. And we decide that we should make this process more transparent, so we will do the bi-weekly update on the production schedule and let you sync the process of the production. Our estimation of the delivery would be the end of September, but, we would let you know.

We fully understand some of our backers could not wait for longer, so we promise to do the full refund, and we have done all the 12 refunds in the past months. So please let us know if you want the refund now.

Back to Oct. 2017, when we answer the comment with "Thank you for your support" it was no more than a polite word for us. But after those whole struggle months, we understand that your support is not something in the air, but it the big reason to keep us stay if not the only one. And we want to deliver a special thanks for Kickstarter to build such a tolerant and supportive community.

We would release some important updates very soon since we have almost nailed our supply chain.

Finally, and sincerely, Thank you for your support! 

2018-8-2 Hao Qian @Home

Hi Backers!  

Here is the latest update on our progress to complete the IC Chip Set redesign. Thanks to the tireless effort of our 5 talented integrated circuits (SoC) experts, we are currently finalizing our chip tests selections and designs. The newly designed chipsets seem to work very well now, and the tracking performance is significantly better and more reliable than demonstrated by earlier prototypes.  

We totally understand that the delay might affect your schedules and possibly your desire to maintain your order. To help keep backers happy, we will continue to provide refunds to those backers that would prefer not to wait.  

We will be providing photos of the production work so that you will be better informed and connected with the Taro Team.  

Also, Taro has achieved great progress in marketing.

The Combined Exhibition with Anta, the Leading Sports Brand in China  

On the business front - last weekend, Taro has partnered with Anta for the special exhibition of the newest sports technology. We have also had some very interesting discussions with very large, well-known corporations that are anxious to place our products under their brand umbrella. These discussions will likely lead to some very exciting announcements in our future updates. We will keep you informed. Clay Thompson, the key contributor in the Warriors' 2017 and 2018 NBA championship, tested Taro. With two Taro’s tags on his arms, auto-tracking can be taken to the professional sports level for both DSLR and smartphones, even under fierce rotation.

See you soon. Best regards!

Taro Team

Hi backers, 

In the last update, we mentioned the chip problem, which is related to the final performance of the tracking module, Taro M1.  

During these days, we keep testing chips in our lab under the strict standard. The algorithms are being redeveloped. To test new chips, our SOC experts are working hard day and night to optimize the circuit, to give a satisfying performance of Taro M1, the tracking module. Currently, we estimate the chip tests would finish within 2 weeks, and the final sample would come out in the middle of July. After the 2 weeks production and package, the delivery would begin, which usually needs 1 or 2 weeks. 

So the earliest delivery time is estimated to begin in late July. We’re working hard on the schedule. As we promised last time, we would accelerate the pace of update, so you'll know the bigger picture of our progress.

 While our hardware team is solving the problem, allow us to share recent advance.

In CES Asia 2018, Taro has a special performance. Peppa Pig is playing a tense match with Ironman, Hulk, and Captain America in a special world cup, with Taro as an AI cameraman. (Check the video above)  

During the "World Cup," Taro focused, filmed on Peppa as if professional cameraman following Messi without any mistake.  

In fact, Taro, as an AI cameraman, could make many more interesting, cool videos. We'll be very exciting to receive creative ideas for your applications. Backers with good ideas would receive a special reward!

We're so happy to win every honor and get friends' appreciation because of you. Without your generous support, we couldn’t conquer challenges to realize the dream and bring fun to people.

Thanks again！Have a good day!

Taro team

Dear backers,

Sorry to keep you waiting for so long! During this period, we worked day and night to present you a satisfying product, so sorry for the late update. Your criticism is a good warning and stimulation to us. We regard it as a lesson to learn how to communicate with you. From now on, at least, it would be an update twice a month, so you could know the bigger picture of the project and reasonably arrange your schedule.

In the last update, we mentioned about the chips problem. This is a crucial part of tracking module, Taro M1, which would affect the final tracking experience.

Fortunately, till now, 5 SOC experts helped us find the chip defects. The cause for this problem was isolated to the electronic chip set being used. They offered us 2 options. We have been busy adapting the production schematics. Till now, we've tested more than 4 chips in our lab under the strict standard. We need more retests. And the algorithms are being redeveloped. Currently, this might bring our schedule late at least for 5 weeks.

We totally understand that this postpone would affect your schedule, so to satisfy our user who can’t wait for the postpone, we would offer them a refund. Sorry again for the inconvenience！

While our hardware team is solving this problem, allow us to share recent advance.

· CES Asia Innovation Award 

We treasure our every honor because of you! Without the generous support from the first group of backers, we couldn’t raise enough confidence to conquer numerous challenges on the road to realize Taro’s dream! 

Also, we would be more than grateful if we could stay together to finalize more cool products in the near future.（ Review the official page）

· Auto-focus in Filming 

As requested by many Taro backers, auto-focus filming could be a super cool feature in Taro. Simply switch the circular as shown in App interface, you could adapt the focus very smoothly. It would let everyone enjoy the filming itself instead of caring about the bothering photography skills. Users could capture more shining moments whenever you like.

It’s expensive and inconvenient to have a remote to manually adapt the focus. What’s more, few products support auto-focus in filming. After hours and hours research and development, we are honored to announce that, Taro would provide auto-focus in filming. Taro would recognize your location and automatically keep the target in the focus to stay clear all the time. Just imagine those professional work only done by videographers, now it's available to you!

We support to manually adapt the focus, as is shown in this video. When we complete the final version, we would share it with you instantly. Please find our preliminary results here and give us more feedback on what you want to use it.

Again, sorry to keep you waiting, but we will make sure your waiting would be worthwhile！

Taro Team

Dear backers,

Thanks for your patience. We thought it best to update you on where we are in the whole process and give you a bigger picture of progress so far.

Thanks for your support all the time, we understand your concern that auto-tracking need work smoothly under many circumstances, so we went through lots of tests. In the end, we found a chip causes more power consumption, which may severely lower the battery life and leads unexpected problem. So we decided to solve it. Recently we’re evaluating experts' solutions these days. Then more chips need to be tested and optimized in the months ahead.

Because of this unexpected problem, the estimated delivery would be postponed to July. We sincerely apologize not making the timely fulfillment. However, we hope to ensure the end result of what we deliver to you is what you’d expect. More time is needed to solve the key issue.

When solving the hardware issue, our software team was not stopped and has achieved some really cool advances.

1. Outdoor long time tracking tests

We know that tracking in outdoor is a key requirement for our user, however, it is also the most challenging part for tracking systems, so we do invest huge time in testing trackings outdoor, please find some of our test results. ( Test results)

2. Sports auto-analysis of the skeleton recognition

As requested by many of our backers, automatic sports analysis is a super cool function to work with Taro, it would let everyone to enjoy the very professional sports supports which were only available in the pro-teams. However, it is really a huge challenge to our AI team. After hours and hours research and development, we are honored to announce that, Taro has the skeleton recognition tech. DONE! It would allow users to analyze their every shoot and every skateboarding jump. Just imagine how much you can do together with our auto-tracking video. Please find our preliminary results here, and give us more feedback on what you want to use it. ( Review the video)

Again, sorry to keep you waiting, but we will make sure your waiting would be worthwhile.

Hi backers,

Thanks to your support, we are able to realize our TARO tracking stabilizer, and trying hard to make it deliver to you on time.

Just now, we brought our 6 samples to the CES and they gain the attention of over 10 thousands users and also get reported by great medias like Engadget. All those won't happen without your help.

Thanks again!

Please check our video on CES and report here.