We hope the new year is going well for everyone now that we're a bit into it. Here at AOTL we're looking forward to a resurgence with an expansion of our product offerings and continuance of the many popular products we've carried from our beginning.

First we would like to address the difficulties we experienced last year. Aaron Smith, who is a founding partner and my close friend of over 30 years, suffered health set backs that have forced him to permanently step away from AOTL. He and his family have asked that there not be any further disclosure of the nature of his health struggles other than he is receiving all the treatment he needs to eventually recover.

With his absence I have been handling all aspects of running AOTL through most of last year. That has been challenging but I've happily excepted the responsibility. What many don't know is that I've been sole owner of Amiga On The Lake LLC since it's creation back in August of 2016. Aaron and I agreed on that approach as he was sole owner of his own business and had too much on his managerial and financial plates with that business. We split the responsibilities of running AOTL between us realizing a long held mutual desire to collaborate in a tech business. Despite not having Aaron around to help I managed as I could and kept the lights on and orders fulfilled.

Fortunately, a long time friend and consultant as well as a part time project collaborator, Jamie Krueger, accepted my invitation to become a full partner in AOTL. The two of us have been working together closely since late last fall to revitalize the business.

We developed plans to add new products to our current line up, some of which are available now, as well as re-establishing relationships with suppliers of the products we've been carrying the past few years. Some of the new products are being developed in house by Jamie and myself to be introduced throughout the rest of this year and into the next.

We're both excited and dedicated to continue to serve the Amiga and retro computer enthusiast markets for years to come. Please stay in touch and follow our developments and offerings as the rest of this year plays out. We hope that we can help all that stop by and shop our site to enjoy their Amiga and retro computer experience in what ever form that may be.

This is brief update on keyboard production status.

There is yet another delay in building more keyboards to complete the last dozen or so of pre-orders and for regular sales inventory. I woefully underestimated the excessive lead times I was going to encounter in getting PCB's manufactured. That's partly due to lead time estimates having become a moving target throughout the industry.

This is very painful for me as I have everything else in sufficient quantities to build keyboards other than PCB's and was supposed to have the PCB's by now. The current ETA to build complete keyboards is 6 to 8 weeks. I've been having everything else built that can be and will continue to do so in preparation for receiving the PCB's.

I'm also looking into other sources and solutions to help mitigate the delay as funds and time allow. 

Thank you all for your continued patience and support!

Some of you may have noticed that if you tried emailing @amigaonthelake.com that your message was rejected and you received a mail delivery failure notice. This was caused by our email and domain hosting service migrating us to a new server.

Unfortunately our stores Domain Name Servers  are managed by a different company, the company that hosts our store. Those servers were not automatically updated to point to the new email server, that has do be done manually by AOTL. We were unaware of the disconnect for a couple of days but after noticing that we weren't receiving any messages we investigated and worked to remedy the problem.

After a few issues were dealt with we have solved the problem and our email is now working properly. Please accept our apologies for any inconveniences or concerns this may of caused.

We thank you for your patience and your patronage.

Jeff Yoder and Aaron Smith

Greetings all. This is an update on the progress of the Kipper2k MX A500 and MX A1200 keyboards.

Progress continues in building and shipping pre-ordered keyboards. The components that were ordered back in May have miraculously arrived thus preventing a pause in completing any builds. This was a welcomed surprise as the estimated ship date from the only vendor expecting stock was 9/28/2022! I was scrambling to try to resolve that potential dilemma but thankfully can reserve the time and energy toward finishing keyboards and getting them all shipped through the next two weeks.

As requested in my last blog post, if you had pre-ordered a keyboard and haven't received it yet please email me with your order number and confirm your shipping address and providing any updates to it. This will save me time as I'll be reaching out by email to anyone I haven't heard from before I ship their keyboard. The email address:

jeff@amigaonthelake.com

Currently, it looks like this August keyboards will be available for purchase. For our current and future customers seeking to buy a keyboard, please check back then. There will be blog updates as required so please check for those as well.

As always, Aaron and myself thank everyone for their patience and their patronage. We continue to forge ahead and will try to do better to serve the Amiga and retro computer community.

Thank you!

(All images courtesy Benjamin van Houts, Australia)

Greetings to all of our customers and the Amiga and retro computer scene at large. We're posting an update on the progress of the building and shipping of the Kipper2k MX A500 and MX A1200 pre-ordered keyboards.

We currently project that the pre-orders will all be fulfilled by the end of this June 2022, mid July 2022 at the latest. Staffing shortages and delays in receiving components have exacerbated an already compromised schedule.

We thank everyone for their amazing and extraordinary patience with us as we work through various issues to complete all of the current keyboard orders. After the pre-orders are all honored, our attention will turn to building keyboards for stock and will be sold as stock becomes available.

Building and restocking inventory will continue as long as the necessary materials remain available and accessible. There will not be a pre-order option for keyboards. Orders will only be accepted for stocked keyboards as it is done for all other items sold on our site.

For customers waiting on their keyboard(s): We have been reaching out by email to confirm that your shipping address is up to date on your order. If you haven't been contacted yet please email Jeff with your full name, order number if available, and your shipping address to:

jeff@amigaonthelake.com

Aaron and my self thank everyone for their patience with this drawn out project. We are both determined and dedicated to honoring all unfulfilled keyboard orders.

We wish everyone good health and success!

I hope this finds everyone doing well and starting to see the light at the end of the long pandemic tunnel where you are. This is another long over due update on the progress of the Kipper2K replacement keyboard project as well as some changes to AOTL.

My desired plan in late fall of 2020 was to get all preorders shipped by the end of 2020. Then I would build up stock of both variants of the keyboard to offer them on Amiga On The Lake’s site for general sale.

Unfortunately that didn’t materialize as intended. We experienced a long delay in the delivery of new stabilizer mechanisms from China which is essentially the only place you can get them in large quantities affordably. In retrospect I should have placed the order much earlier than I did but I didn’t realize just how long the transaction would take to complete.

As we continue on in are fifth year of operation we have been faced with making needed changes to facilitate growth and to maintain and improve customer service. One of these changes is moving inventory and the packing activities to a larger space. That space will no longer be in the same building as the business office as it has been since our beginning in 2016. We are moving it to a dedicated building that offers room to grow and facilitates a more efficient layout for processing and packing orders. This move is ongoing and should reach its conclusion in mid April.

In this same spirit I have initiated changes to the production area I use to construct the Kipper2K keyboards. This space is too small as it is currently configured. I am making a number of improvements and reorganizing the available space to speed up the building and testing of the keyboards.

As this is a part time endeavor for both myself and Aaron there have been brief but frequent interruptions in normal day to day AOTL business related to the previously mentioned activities. That of course also affects my progress on the keyboards. However that doesn’t affect our resolve to deliver them all to the remaining preorder customers. The current plan is to accomplish that by the end of June of this year, 2021.

General sale of the keyboards will commence sometime in July. The stock will be replenished as I build up batches of each keyboard variant (A500 and A1200). So there will be times of zero stock until I can replenish inventory as is the case with many of our other products that experience lead times from their sources. With an improved production process those zero stock periods should be short and infrequent.

That certainly wasn’t a nutshell version of events here at AOTL but it helps bring you up to date of what has happened and what’s to come. My late New Years resolution will be to produce these updates much more frequently in this blog space.

In my next update I’ll cover why this keyboard will not be offered as a kit as many have been asking for. I’ll also give an update on the changes going on here at AOTL.

We've shipped out some keyboards over the past week and we're finishing up keyboards to ship out this week. We also have the next ones started for the following week. This is going to go on for the next four to five months before we get all the pre-orders fulfilled.

It has been brought to our attention by some of our customers that we're being viewed as unprofessional in the way we've handled this project. We can't refute that sentiment when we place our selves out side looking in. We do have the painful advantage of knowing why this isn't going as well as we all would like. We are thus shouldering the responsibility of that view and working hard at improving our performance while not jeopardizing fulfilling customer orders for the rest of our products.

Next to the high priority of building and shipping keyboards is the next priority, perhaps the higher priority, and that's communication. We'll continue to make a better effort here as well but with just the two of us running AOTL and my time consumed at the bench we kindly ask for some allowances here. We do our best to answer emails and messages posted at the AOTL site in a timely manner. Some times we miss the notifications and don't answer right away but we're not ignoring anyone and don't want anyone feeling disrespected if a reply is slow to come.

The Blog here will be utilized more often as well. It will be shared to the AOTL Facebook page. As far as the Forums go we just don't have the time to get to them. Personally I only have time for this Blog and email messages and very occasionally Facebook.

That is the current state of things here. I hope for our US customers that the weekend and Memorial Day were both good. And for our customers around the world that all of you are healthy and safe.

Best wishes from the AOTL team.

The AOTL team

It's time to show off another one of our projects almost completed. This was done by Kipper2K and funded by Amiga On The Lake.

Kipper2K has been working on something great so let him tell you all about this project that he has been working on for some time now.  

For The Best Selling Personal Computer in the World

The Commodore 64!

The Kipper2K C64MX keyboard with keycaps

and ...




This shows basic keycaps added when I was initially setting it up. Keycaps will have the symbols as well as the letters.

Keyboard is fully functioning and will have new keycaps and there will be a choice of what type, the user prefers (more on that later).

The board is complete and can be used with USB so users can use with their PC and SBC's if needed. Will post more info on it later.

Still have a couple of more new projects to announce, next one will be shortly so stay tuned.

You are welcome. Be on the look out for struct and updates to Workbench Explorer.