Hot News Served Ice Cold... The Big Sphere Arrived!
over 6 years ago – Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 01:07:41 AM

Finally, the Prototypes of the new Big Spheres are finished. 

In short:
- new prototypes of the big spheres are finished
- new videos: The Big Sphere, A Song of Ice and Fire
- big sphere, add-on or new campaign? 
- 249€ will be the price for one big sphere
- stretch goal: corporate design packing vs.cleaning towel?
- we decided to not indicate the sun with an "artificial line"

In less short:

Hurray, finally the prototypes for the 15cm spheres, one Milky Way and one Universe Sphere, arrived safe and sound. They look astonishing, especially together with the new LED base containing 15 symmetrically arranged led´s, they light up a whole room. It projects three colored circles on the ceiling and with the right distance even a projection of the inside of the sphere. 

I realized that it looks super cool to have an incense stick next to a sphere, so the smoke is lighted up, but I wanted to go a bit further with the video. I bought some dry ice, mixed it with water and got some pretty dense smoke. The result can be seen in these videos:

(I slowed the video down because the smoke moved really fast. It only had 30fps so I interpolated the frames, which lead to some weird optical effects, that occur a few times within the first video.)

Big Sphere as an Add-On or a new Campaign?

Even though we added the big sphere as a stretch goal, we decided to make a whole new campaign for it. Let us explain the benefits:

• First, we want to continue to improve the big sphere.
  There are some production processes that lead to an imperfect Universe Sphere, but we want it to be marvelous.
• We also want to collect a minimum of 50 backers, that back the big sphere, so we can grant a good price.
• The campaign will stay simple and short, but it will give us more time for improvements on the sphere, negotiations with the shipping distributor, planning of a safe way to ship the heavy spheres.

While making the video, I realized, how awesome the big sphere is, but that we should not rush it now. I know, that some of you already wait for it for a long time, but be aware, it´s almost done. We will feed you with updates, awesome pictures and you will finally be able, to hold the big sphere in your hand, but only short, because it is pretty heavy...

The price:
We thought a lot over a good price for the big sphere. Alone an empty glass ball in this size cost´s around 80€. To laser something inside a ball of this size needs a special adapter, a lot of time (about two hours per sphere), does not succeed every time and wears out the lens of the laser (due to reflections, it also gets etched, so you have to change the 3,000€ lens more often). We found glass art without educational purpose or anything similar for thousands of Euros. But we don´t want it to be only for rich people, so we decided to sell it for 249€ plus shipping.

Stretch Goal - Corporate Design Packing 

We also realized that the corporate design for the packing will cost around 20,000€. We got different offers from several companies and we saw, that it is a larger investment than we thought. We want to "put back" money for this investment and will implement it with the next big campaign, the Sun in a Sphere.

As a compensation, we will add a microfiber cleaning towel to every sphere. We want to take these ones: 

We hope that nobody is disappointed about the changes we made and is still excited for their spheres.

Best regards
from Christoph, Veronika and Clemens

Prototype III , Instagram and the Big Sphere
over 6 years ago – Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 11:32:22 PM

We want to Share some Information about our Progress.

In short:

- We met Ronald and finished the model for our 3rd prototype. We added 150 globular clusters, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy and a tiny line of dots, representing our location within the Milky Way.

- We started our campaign "The Universe Around the World" on Instagram and Twitter. 24 backer sent us a total of 40 awesome pictures with their spheres. Please also share your pictures with us, so we can share them with everyone. 

[email protected]
https://www.instagram.com/cinkslabs/

- Finally, the adapter for the big sphere arrived. The prototype will be manufactured tomorrow, so we can hope to get it on Monday and send you pictures on Tuesday.*Fingers crossed*

- We now have a student as a support for the emails for 40h/month

- I want to design a new base for the big sphere, any suggestions?

In less short:

Some of you might know, my brother lives in Vienna and I live in Berlin. So I went there on a workation (work&vacation) last week. We met Ronny, our Designer and finished the 3rd and hopefully the last prototype of our Milky Way. Together we added the 150 globular clusters, that surround our home galaxy, the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy and a tiny line to mark our Sun inside the Milky Way. We decided to not add the Magellanic clouds, because they are simply too far away, to fit in the scale. 

This video is a bit shaky and not really smooth, but you can see our prototype quite good there.
 

The Universe Around the World

24 Backer sent us 40 beautiful pictures, so now we have enough pictures to post one per day on Instagram for the next one or two Month. I improve the colors of every picture and add a corporate design explanation. We would be very happy if more of our previous backer would send us pictures of their spheres to [email protected] , so we can post one picture every day.

https://www.instagram.com/cinkslabs/  

Also, we thought about sending one or two minor status updates on Twitter every day. To be honest, neither my brother nor I used Twitter before, so we need to get used to it, but that´s the plan. If you want to follow us you can find our Twitter account here:

https://twitter.com/cinkslabs

The Adapter for the 15cm Sphere

Finally, I got the message, that the adapter is finished and will arrive tomorrow at the birthplace of the Universe Sphere. Then, the sphere will be lasered, as well as the sphere of our 3rd prototype of the Milky Way. They should arrive here on Monday, so I can upload pictures of it on Tuesday. It was quite unexpected that it took so long to finish the adapter (the first one was too small, the second had a huge delay). We are very happy, that it arrived before the end of our campaign, even though we will offer the big sphere after the campaigns end over Backerkit. 

We have not set a price yet for the big sphere and would be happy about honest recommendations from our backers. 

Our Helping Hand

Welcome Veronika, our helping hand for the next months. She will help us with answering emails. We noticed, that it´s too much for only my brother and me, so there were some delays in answering the emails in the past, which shouldn´t happen anymore.

A new Base for a new Sphere

We found a bigger LED Bases for the big sphere and now we want to design an LED Fitting Base for it. The new base has 15 instead of 5 LED´s inside. If you have suggestions for more bases for the big sphere, I would love to get your Ideas in the comments. I thought about a turtle with 4 elephants on it´s back, holding the Universe Sphere :D

Best regards, 

Christoph, Veronika and Clemens

250,000€, around 2,500 backer and the size of a sun
over 6 years ago – Fri, Mar 30, 2018 at 11:34:58 PM

What would the size of a sun be, if it were inside the Universe Sphere? Joshua, one of our backer, sent us a neat little calculation, with a surprising result!

Short information: We added more questions to the FAQ, that we were asked frequently.
Small personal song recommendation for this update: Serj Tankian--Electron

My Brother and I want to thank you all for your giant support, your pleasant conversations in the comments and any kind of backing our campaign, for example answering questions or feed us with information like Joshua did. He sent us an email with an awesome calculation, that explains, how big a sun would be inside the Universe Sphere.  

First, he converted 250 Mpc into meter, then put the size of the lasered structure in relation to the actual size of 250 Mpc to calculate the size of a galaxy to 6.1µm.
With that value, he calculated the size of a star within this galaxy. The result is 9.08x10^-18m , but what is so special about it?...

Each star inside this sphere is about the size of an electron. This totally blew my mind so I wanted to share it with you. If the galaxy is the size of a 6.1 µm tall bacteria, the suns are the size of electrons. The "Cracks" inside the sphere are also only several µm large, but look bigger through the reflection of the light, so this is actually a pretty good scale model.

I hope, this information shortens your waiting time until the new adapter for the 15 cm sphere arrives and we can entertain you with new prototypes.
Until then, best regards, Clemens and Christoph

200.000€ and 2^11 Backer!!!1!1eleven!
over 6 years ago – Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 05:55:29 PM

And now...the Big Sphere?
Not yet unfortunately, but why? 

In short:

• No Big Sphere for now, because of a delay of the adapter for it.
• Shipping costs: We add the option of a cheaper, but more risky shipping method for the countries with 50€ shipping. 25€ without tracking and insurance.
• Kickstarter Newsletter + product of the day, Thisiswhyimbroke, Fox News, Digital trends, the free advertisement for our product is so nice! I hope we continue to be this lucky. Feel free to help us ;)
• We will use Backerkit for the purchase of add-ons and the selection of Pocket MW, LED Bases and all kinds of possible future add-ons. (Will be explained in an Update)
• FAQ: Will be updated soon.

In less short:

• To laser etch into a glass orb, you need an adapter. It´s like a block of glass, that has a concave lens on one side. This lens compensates the curvature of the glass ball, so the laser beam will not get deviated. Unfortunately the previous adapter was made too small, so another one had to be made. We hoped, that the arrival of the new adapter was before we reached our second stretch goal, but we got the notice, that it will arrive around 1st April (man I hope that was no April fool from that company). I will send you an update as soon as we get the adapter and start producing the fist Big Sphere!
  We want to offer two kinds of it, one with a flat bottom so that it can stay on it´s own and a complete sphere, let us know, what you think about it in the comments.
  
• Cheap shipping: In our first campaign, we calculated 16€ for the shipping world wide. This turned out to be quite a big mistake. There is a "product" called "Päckchen Welt" you can send packages up to 2kg around the world for 16€,
  BUT: it is not tracked, nor insured and a package with two spheres weights 2.1Kg, so it is too heavy. When a package was sent back "unclaimed", we had to pay 20€... We realized, that this is not the best option and decided to send our packages tracked and insured, which lead to quite some losses, because alone the shipping to the US raised from 16€ to 23€ and that was the super special offer from DHL. Quite some of you asked, whether 50€ shipping is really necessary, so we decided to also offer you the "Päckchen Welt" option later in Backerkit for 25€. 
  If you want, you can order one sphere and a few add-ons with the untracked and uninsured shipping.
  
• We are really happy, that so many websites and people like our spheres, but if you are, or if you know a blogger, feel free to write about us and help with the expanding of the Universe Sphere.
  
• We will use Backerkit for the purchase and the selection of add-ons like Pocket MW, LED bases, all kinds of possible future add-ons and of cause additional spheres. (Will be explained in an update). You will be able to change your pledges, add products like power supply for the LED base plate etc. Last time we did it without Backerkit to save costs, but it was also a lot of work and lead to some confusions, so we decided to give Backerkit a try.
  
• We want to fill up the FAQ within the next days, because some questions appear more often and we want to avoid getting too many emails.

Thank you a lot for your support, your time, your money and your lovely comments.
Best regards, Clemens, Christoph, CinkS labs

The Milky Way in your pocket...
over 6 years ago – Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 12:41:25 AM

...for 15€, worldwide shipping included!

We are finally able to present our stretch goal, the Milky Way in a 3x3x1cm glass block. It fits in your pocket, can be a gift for someone you want to surprise or can amaze your date on a starry night. But we also want to make it possible for schools to inspire kids by giving them their own Milky Way. We are able to send up to 10 blocks in one Jiffy bag and will offer a special school pledge level with 30 Pocket Milky Way´s, a Universe Sphere and a Milky Way Sphere on LED´s.

We added 2 Pledge Levels: 

The Pocket Milky Way: You can get up to ten Pocket Milky Way´s if you pledge for 15€ plus 10€ per additional Pocket Milky Way. 

The Pocket Milky Way classroom edition: You will get 30 Pocket Milky Way´s together with one Universe Sphere, one Milky Way Sphere and 2 LED Plates for 349€ plus shipping.

You already pledged: No problem, you can just add 10€ for each additional Pocket Milky Way up to 10 to your regular pledge plus 5€ shipping once. It will be sent separately in a Jiffy bag. 
Nevertheless, we will use Backer Kit, to give you the opportunity to adjust your order after the end of our campaign.