One Hundred Boards

A dispatch from the packing table, September 2026. The founders batch is one hundred units, and this is the part of it that arrived first.

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The lot

JLCPCB order W2026083121345899 shipped on September 8: one hundred Rev D control boards, gerbers TiltRodV3.0_RevD_gerbers_P10. It is the first time I have held a hundred of anything with my name on it.

Rev D is the board that ran the first full drivetrain test in August. It puts the AS5600 encoder on the PCB itself, so the only wires left in a unit are the motor lead and USB-C power. The XIAO ESP32-C6 sockets into J10 and J20; a dead radio is a pull-and-press, not a rework station. The two status LEDs are back-mounted and glow through the shell.

Boards in their lot bag, four lot labels on the box.

Serials for boards, lot codes for motors

Every board that ships gets a serial, TF-D-nnnn, allocated in one continuous sequence and never reused. The first ten were done by hand in July with a QR to the bare domain and the serial as plain text, and the range is reconstructed from a bag photo showing TF-D-0004. That is why a log exists now. The August 26 run did TF-D-0011 through 0022 from a generator; the next run starts at 0023.

Bought-in parts are different. A motor gets a lot code, not a serial, applied by whoever makes it from artwork I send. Nobody will ever care which individual motor is in a unit. Someone will care which lot it came from, the day one batch's clutch behaves differently on the bench. A board is a finished good going to a named person; in eighteen months the question is "which board is this," and TF-D-0014 answers it.

The supplier's own name goes on the label too. With two motor sources shipping the same part number in the same bag, that is the only way to tell whose is whose on the shelf.

The QR is not ours to choose

Every label carries a QR that opens the part's specification sheet: /p/pcb-rev-d, /p/motor-rev-a, and so on. The slug is per revision. Rev E gets its own sheet, its own slug, and its own QR, and pcb-rev-d is never repointed. A bag ships and the URL on it is out of my hands; the sheet it opens has to be the sheet for that revision, permanently.

The label's URL and QR are generated from the same code that serves the page. Nobody hand-types either. An unknown slug fails at generation, not on a printed bag.

Serial, part number, QR to the Rev D sheet.

An unplanned use

The spec-sheet page exists to back a sticker. It turned out to be the most useful thing in the motor RFQ. Every supplier thread's assistant ingested tiltforge.com/p/motor-rev-a and started reciting the requirement back: 6 V, 60 RPM, 4.2 kg·cm, the relief and the unthreaded land. A URL survives translation, cannot be misremembered, and is versioned. It now goes in the first message to every new supplier, alongside the drawing.

What a hundred boards do not do

They do not make a hundred units. Each still needs a motor, a printed drive set, a shell, a sprung clutch stack, calibration, and a bench test. The motors are the long pole, and the last post on that is November. Everything else is in the shop.

The TiltRod, by TiltForge, is a retrofit smart blind motor — repairable, open, Matter-native, and the cord always works. Founders pricing on the first 100 units; first units ship November 2026. Check your headrail at tiltforge.com/fit or follow the build at tiltforge.com/#waitlist.