Hey DBSAR/āBLFLanternPMā(SIGShooter?), information in Barryās post #7800 is probably noteworthy to include in this threadās OP or in the information threadās post #2.
Underline and italic added by me.
At this point all the lanterns are shipping from China so there shouldnāt be any problems in ordering to UK through Amazon whether itās .com or .de since theyāre shipping from China.
As far as Ebay purchase goes you need to make an offer including at least your BLF username and then wait for it to be accepted.
With AliExpress itās a bit more involved: place an order but do not pay, message your BLF username and wait for the price of the order to be adjusted by them after which you can pay for it.
If you prefer āFulfilled by Amazonā feel free to wait for those batch 2 units to reach Amazon warehouse. Although who knows how long that will take or how many units is āsomeā.
Nor do we know how Amazon EU or Sofirn will handle VAT for Amazon.de FBA.
I noticed something interesting the other day. Many years ago, I made separate Amazon accounts on the .com, .co.uk and .de sites. By chance, Iāve just moved to a new email address, which I updated on the .co.uk site. When I went to the other two to replicate the change, it had already updated.
It might be that any Amazon account can log into and order from any Amazon site now. If thatās the case and your code is giving you grief on your local site, it might work on one of the others. All LT1s are shipping from China at the moment, so the site you use wonāt affect shipping time, although it might affect any VAT or sales tax that gets applied.
Production prototypes were sent out to TK, Lexel & myself to run through a battery of tests to work out bugs, but there were no free current production units sent.
If Sofirn is smart about this they should shower you and the team with a few freebies to keep you happy cranking out more cool (and profitable for them) projectsā¦
I would tend to agree with this and quoted a post a few pages ago also agreeing that there should be a donation link on Paypal or somewhere for this as well.
Our company sends out fringe benefits to people who assist us in assorted ways.
Got my Amazon code this morning, did change it to a code with batteries and got the new code in about an hour.
So of course I had to order right away (being no 383 I donāt feel bad about that) and just donāt care about first or second batch. The way I see it, itās a coinflip which one is ābetterā. Got a bad switch with the Q8, got the āgoodā lens with the fw3a (but missed out on the color ones).
Whatever problem there might be, this forum will fix it.
I know that the lantern is aware of the battery voltage, as it displays this information via the battcheck feature. My son was just asking whether it would be possible to configure the lantern to stop charging when a certain voltage was reached, to extend the lifetime of the batteries.
For those scenarios where the lantern is also connected to a solar charger, this would be a nice feature, albeit a niche one.
To be fair to Sofirn this is the largest BLF project ever and no doubt the next one will go much smoother with the notifications. Writing an ordering application that allows a person to enter a unique user code which then responds with an appropriate purchase code would be something to consider for a future buy.
Is the group buy price $49.99 for the bare light & $12 more for the batteries? Guy at Ali Express Sofirn Store said the price was already lowered @ $68.24ā¦ I hope he is plain wrong because thatās not what I rememberā¦ Did the price change or am I just plain wrong, LOL?
If I understand correctly, user āSofirnā is sending the codes out (someone please correct me if Iām wrong). If you havenāt had a BLF PM from them, you might need to send them a PM of your own to point that out.
All codes are being sent by BLF PM, not email. Even if you have your PMs set to notify you by email, the notification doesnāt always get sent.
BLF mysteriously stopped sending me notification emails a couple of weeks ago, even though I could see new PMs when I checked on BLF, and I still had the email notifications turned on.
I turned notifications off, changed to a different email address, then turned notifications back on again - that got it working for me, at least.
My advice: if youāre in the first 500 and havenāt had a PM with your code yet, manually check your BLF PMs from time to time, just in case.
Latest lantern slot Iāve heard of getting a code PM is #397 (ToyKeeper).