It’s 2020 and progress on the Mark II continues. As we mentioned in our previous post we are planning on moving forward with a hardware partner in early 2020. We were able to meet with our partner at CES and we got a chance to see some of the other projects they have been working on. They have some cool stuff in the works, and we are excited to see them apply their innovative process to the Mark II hardware. We came away from the meeting more confident than ever in our decision.

Unfortunately, we still are not ready to make the big announcement that signals the start of the project with our chosen engineering partner. I know we have asked you to be patient with us, and we are asking that once again. It is taking time to recover from our previous misstep in the hardware design of the Mark II and we want to get it right this time.

Just because we have not started on the production-ready Mark II doesn’t mean we are sitting idle. We have been continuing to improve the Mycroft software and develop the new GUI elements. We showed our progress with Kivy and Qt in our last update. This update we are providing all of the documentation necessary to build the same Raspberry Pi 3 (Rpi3) based Mark II prototype that you have seen in the update videos.

We are sharing:

3D printing files – STL

CAD files – STP

Wiring Diagrams

Exploded views

Bill of Materials

Assembly Videos

You can grab all these from our Github:

https://github.com/MycroftAI/hardware-mycroft-mark-II-rpi

This isn’t a simple project, it requires 3D printing, soldering, creating custom cable assemblies, and final assembly. We know there are some backers that will be interested in building their own Mark II prototypes despite the fact that they are receiving a production Mark II later this year. An immense benefit to having some Mark II prototypes out in the wild, is that we can get some feedback on the software and iterate more effectively.

We’d love to see the prototypes you build too. Join us in the Mark II channel on Mycroft Chat or post in the Community Forums to show off your own creations.

We wouldn’t be here without our passionate community members who are building Picrofts, developing Skills, contributing to Mycroft Core, working on translations, and more while they wait for the production device to arrive. You are awesome, we appreciate you, and thanks for your understanding!