Work around for firmware/configuration update error "command not recognized"
I spent more than an hour attempting to update my Drop Shift keyboard. I'm not sure what has changed, but I was not able to do it entirely from the Drop website as I had previously done. I have most of the keys configured how I would like, but the default LED function was a very bright, distracting, rainbow wave going across the keyboard. Every time I turned the computer on I had to manually adjust the lights how I liked. Using the online version or the locally installed app, you first have to install the QMK XAP interface. You then have to flash your already configured firmware file, which can be done on the Drop website. If you are logged in your last configuration is saved under your account and you can alter what you like, so you don't have to start from scratch. So, following the instructions I selected the appropriate board, entered bootloader mode, but when attempting to flash the file, I would get an error that the C:/Users/Mike C..... command is not recognized...
Oct 18, 2024
- Your parcel will be delivered on time
- Your parcel will basically never get lost
- You can always call a customer service line and find out exactly where it is, redirect it, or do whatever you need.
End-to-End service is what the courier companies pride themselves on, and it’s what makes them billions of dollars a year. The customers are typically businesses that need to reliably move cargo, parts, and documents around the world in a reliable manner. As mentioned earlier, this service is extremely expensive and cost prohibitive for nearly all e-commerce transactions, (except when you’re buying expensive/small items like Laptops, etc). Reality So the actual service provided by Drop, and the vast majority of International E-commerce providers, is one that uses a mosaic of different courier services who continually hand-off the package depending on network availability. Instead of Fedex carrying the parcel end-to-end, we’ll often see a route like:- Fedex picks up the parcel at our warehouse and takes it to a port.
- DHL will take the parcel on one of their planes, and fly it to London.
- Royal Mail will take the parcel from DHL and deliver it to the household.
What’s unfortunate about a service using a patchwork of networks is that no single carrier takes responsibility over the delivery of the package in a timely manner (or at all). If things are slow, or get lost, they can all (reasonably) point fingers at each other as being the culprit. Ultimately, there is little brand or reputational damage on the line with these services and the quality of the service reflects that. The second problem is that these parcels are marked to typically use excess capacity within the network. In layman’s terms, these packages get loaded onto planes or trucks when there’s leftover space on a pre-scheduled route, and if there isn’t, they sit and wait until there is space. This means that the time it takes to deliver the parcel can be highly variable. Despite these drawbacks, the advantage is that the price of the service also reflects that. That Fedex parcel that we quoted above, costing $240 retail, or $120 (discounted rate) to move, will cost as little as $25 when shipping via an International E-Commerce service. A $25 courier charge makes a $150 order 'economically feasible' for most people, compared to paying $120 to ship something that cost $150. The frustrating part about this economical service is that it’s missing two of the most important questions when you’re trying to track your parcel…- How long will it take for it to get to me?
- Is it lost?
For the first question, carriers often don’t know “when there will be space on the plane” to move your parcel, which means no delivery estimate can be made. For the second question, packages are often in limbo between one carrier and another, so neither can affirmatively say they have it and that it is not lost. With all of this, we don’t mean to scare you away from placing an International order with us, we simply want to inform you of what to expect from the delivery process. We also have two important things to remind you of:- Less than 1% of parcels that we ship internationally are definitively lost.
- The ultimate responsibility to get the parcel to your door is ours, and ours alone. If your package gets lost in transit, you’ll be provided with a full refund (or we’ll ship you a new unit if it’s available).
So while the process of watching your parcel’s tracking number “not update” for two weeks may be extremely stressful and frustrating, rest assured if that were it to happen we’ll make sure you’re looked after when everything is resolved. We typically use 6-weeks as the cut-off time for declaring an international parcel as lost, and you'll see why in the data... Data Not surprisingly, the most common International country that we ship to is our neighbors to the North, which is Canada. An important thing to remember is that all couriers use business days (not calendar days) when counting their delivery times. All data presented is from Drop.com international shipments and spans September 1st, 2020 to Oct 1st, 2020:- Place order on Monday
- Order ships Tuesday
- Order Delivered by Friday
In these situations, an order shipping internationally to Canada will typically beat a coast-to-coast domestic USA shipment! In the distribution, you can see that the majority, 32% of packages, take 6-7 business days to arrive at their destination. Based on when during the week you ordered, this will often be close to two weeks after you count the weekends. Similarly, the 4-5 day bucket will almost always be one full calendar week (6-7 calendar days), unless you ordered Sunday, and it shipped on a Monday. Most importantly, we want to show you the “tail” of the distribution, which is the unfortunate 5.78% of orders that take 11-15 days, or the nearly 0.5% that take 16+ days. While these percentages may seem small, we ship thousands of packages so we have dozens of customers that fall into this range on a weekly basis- you’ll often hear/see them in our discussion system showing concern about their parcel. In fact, you typically only hear about these 'horror stories', because the happy customers don't post! As mentioned above, there really isn’t much that we can do about “speeding up” or “getting more tracking” about these packages. They’re (slowly) working their way through the system, and almost always will be delivered, but it could take as long as 4-6 weeks to reach the final destination. Our customer service team may seem like they're doing nothing about the situation, and the reality is that waiting to see what happens is really the only option. At the 6 week mark (in nearly all situations), if the parcel hasn’t been delivered we declare it as lost and we'll dispatch another one (or provide a refund). We'll contrast Canada with Australia, and show you what the data looks like: