Originally published in the “Pixelkit” Tumblr in 2014, May. Also available in Russian on snnkv.com. Below text is quoted without editing.
The reason there’ve been no new posts in this blog for two years is well-known to many of you: I’ve had my hands full with Lightpack, which was taking absolutely all of my time. Today, Lightpack is a product sold in an edition of more than 10 000 pieces solely by us and the amount of wildlife devices is a legion due to the open-source model, which allows any amateur to assemble a device at home (and they apparently started doing that right after project’s publishment in February 2011). And I say no more about clones.
1 It is easy to say so in 2014
Most Lightpack’s history can be traced by posts on habrahabr.ru , mine and not. Yet the moment of triumph for us was the Kickstarter campaign a year ago. First project originated from Izhevsk. Still the first and only1 Russian project that gathered more than half a million dollars there. Almost 6 000 of backers and one and a half sleepless months.
2 минуты до конца. У нас $0,5 млн
— Mikhail Sannikov (@Atarity) May 31, 2013
So clear in my memory is this tweet and the last 3 hours of campaign, when I was starting to realize that there was no way back and that I owed a loadful of Lighpacks to lots of real unknown people. And fresh in my mind is the last device shipment in the beginning of February 2014 that concluded this crazy challenge.
All in all, experience, gained during work on Lightpack cannot be evaluated in money/currency, device/containers or man/hours. It was a singular adventure, filled with emotions and new encounters. Now it came to the end and we got to move on.
Today I’m glad to formally announce that Izhevsk’s team (Tim Sattarov, Iliya Popov and me) is parting from Lightpack project that we created at the beginning of 2011. It became possible after we reached another big milestone: fulfillment of commitments to our Kickstarter backers. Starting today, Woodenshark, the Saint-Petersburg’s team, becomes fully responsible for Lightpack’s development and support.
The whole March and part of April we’ve been handing over the administration. I’ve finished filling the missing parts of documentation, roadmap, prepared and handed over all copies of private repositories, websites, archives, IP etc to Dmitry Gorilovsky, who is the new project owner. Yesterday Tim published his last Prismatik release. I’m quite certain Tim will continue to work on this software as a freelancer for some determined time, just because handing over repositories with such broad language distribution is no trifle.
Currently, we sold out our project shares and stopped taking any part in it. In the nearest time all links will lead to lightpack.tv. All my repositories will be marked as deprecated until the new owner stages new repositories that could be referred to. Any questions related to the project should be directed to official support.
The first reaction of anyone who I anyway had to tell this news before this post was to ask me the question what my next project was. Well, here’s my answer: there will be a next project, but we haven’t decided what to take on yet. Anyhow, we need a little break to free our minds of Lightpack for good, to change environment and to give serious thoughts to the yet another first step. So the nearest two months will be the time we are most vulnerable to new ideas and offers.
Stay tuned.