One of the things I had promised [1] to talk about is not just the fun technical bits of this whole project, but also the boring logistical bits.  This is a good opportunity to talk about where this is, and what's between here and launching the campaign and taking your money!  A user, as far as I can tell, joined the Bambu Lab forums explicitly to say they wanted my thing, and then posted nowhere else other than to complain that it's taking too long, which definitely feels like quite a compliment to me, and some solid market validation.  I gave a short overview there, but here's the longer answer.

But before I give a longer answer, well, ... I guess I'm going to have to ask another question.

Another question: What do I actually need to launch a product?

Roughly, there are three categories of certainty that I need to have before I can actually start taking money.  What I need is:

• I have to be sure I can make the thing I'm promising to make, and I have to know how much it's going to cost me, and I have to have a good idea of who's going to do what.  There are some baseline things here that you'd expect that just take some time: for instance, I need to get some quotes from contract manufacturers (done that), make sure that the contract manufacturers are prepared to actually build it for me (mostly done that), run the numbers on what my margins will look like in "goes great" and "goes bad" conditions (done that; I promise I'll write about that, but only when everything is all said and done).
  
  There are things in here that surprised me, and took longer than I expected.  For instance, I had expected that every CM in China would be able to get me the same shipping rates to the US; the CM that I really wanted to work with, though, seemed only to be able to get much worse rates from DHL than I had expected.  They were quoting me like $400 to send a box of X1Plus Expansion Boards to me, whereas the other CMs were quoting more like $150.  Then, when I got a quote directly from DHL, they were saying it'd be more like $1,000!  This clearly would not do.  I spent like a week of worrying about this trying to learn about Shenzhen freight forwarders (answer: they exist but you have to go to Huaqiangbei and talk to them yourself), and then finding some US import brokers who at least had a corporate rate with DHL.  Then, after trying to find the best of bad options, the DHL corporate account guy finally called me back and said that he was behind on his e-mails because he had been in a car accident, and that he could get me completely reasonable rates with my shipping volume, and that was the end of that.
  
  Manufacturing is death by a million cuts.  The more of my ducks I get in a row beforehand, the more schedule margin I have later to mitigate chaos later.
• I have to actually have enough creative collateral to put on a launch page.  You can basically put anything on a prelaunch page because nobody is giving you money -- they're just giving you their e-mail address, and who cares about that?  But when it comes time to get people to give you dolla billz, you have to prove that you actually plan to put in enough effort to give them their thing, and the best way to prove that is by showing that you've put in a decent amount of effort already on getting it ready for launch.  It's just a respect thing for your audience!
  
  So, 2,500 words later, my poor Crowd Supply project manager has to deal with editing my overly-lengthy writing.  Every good Crowd Supply page has a comparison table; this one needed one too.  Every good crowdfunding page of any kind needs to be frank about the risks of the project, and then pump the creator up to show that they know what they're doing and that you should trust them.  A decent crowdfunding page has text and pictures; a great one has a video, so I guess I need to print myself a steadicam grip for my a6600.
  
  Even if I were just throwing this over the wall onto a Tindie page and walking away whistling, even if it's not mandatory to turn on a "buy" button there, this sort of stuff would be important.  It would still be a lot of time to write this for a Tindie page (but I wouldn't have an editor).  It would still be a bunch of time with a camera (but I wouldn't have someone to fix my poor lighting decisions).  No matter where you launch, you need launch collateral.
• I have to have people who are ready to buy it.  The good news is: this campaign has been a surprisingly large organic success so far!  I have a lot of people's e-mail addresses!  Like, way more than I had thought!  Like 700 of y'all seem to be excited about this thing!  I have no idea how many of you are going to convert to buying boards, though -- and once I have a buy button available, I need to have the outside world ready to continue to drive traffic to that buy button.  In the 3D printing world, that roughly means getting YouTube creators on board with your stuff, because it's the future, where all information comes from videos.  (But it's always nice to have, say, a friendly blog post!  Hey friends, write a blog post about X1Plus Expander Board!)
  
  In order to seed creators with units that they can start playing with and talking about and getting people excited about, though, that means that I need firmware that's useful by people more than just... me.  I mean, I can get my printer to trigger my mirrorless, and, like, that's definitely rad, but unless there's GUI support for it, or at least documentation, I'm just not so sure that anyone else is going to get to do that.
  
  If I want creators to start making content that intercepts the middle of a campaign, then roughly, that means that I need them to be seeded with boards and firmware ideally before the campaign launches -- even if they're not production boards or production-quality firmware, they have to at least be able to play with it!

Woof, that was a lot.  Ok.  But now that you have the context for it, that's the beginning of an answer to: what's taking so long?  So now I get to tell you my secret plans, or, at least, what I think is left between here and launching the campaign.  Luckily, the list is actually pretty finite!

• I need to finish a round of edits on the text for the campaign page.  I spent all of yesterday writing a mess, and the first draft is basically done; now, it needs to be copy-edited, and then churned into the Crowd Supply CMS.  Thank your local technical writer, folks.  You have no idea how hard their life is when they have to deal with engineers like me.
• I have a video to shoot.  That's probably a next weekend job.  I have a script for it all laid out, with all the shots I need; I need to move my X1 up to my brightly lit office and take a bunch of video, then load it into Resolve.  How hard could it be?  I did it once before, after all.
• I have to go do the math on wholesale pricing.  I'm pretty sure I understand what campaign pricing is going to be at this point, but I need to figure out what pricing is going to be like for resellers.  While I'm at it, since Mouser is Crowd Supply's primary distributor, I need to send them some documents to convince them that I'm a real business.
• I need to write enough of a GUI for X1Plus itself so that you can at least turn on and off the LEDs, and wire up some GPIOs, and make people wish that they had a better configuration framework.  Probably some written documentation wouldn't be a bad idea, either.
• I need to get my slides together for Supercon, where I am talking about X1Plus and this board!  (Do you have tickets yet?)

So when does this all have to be done by?  Oh, well, say, how about ... Supercon?  Yeah, that sounds like a good deadline.  It would be nice to be at Supercon and have people be able to click 'give Joshua money', rather than just 'subscribe an e-mail address'.

We'll see if it happens.  I think it's not an overly ambitious goal.  There's a fair bit to do but I think it's doable.

[1] Ok, I promised Heiko.  The rest of you have to suffer through my promise to him.