Thanks pico, no actually we were pending approval when the new rules went into effect and had to take several days working back and forth with our handler at kickstarter, to make a ton of changes to get approved.
We were the first hardware to hit the "new hardware rule" gauntlet, and the second one to make it through.
We essentially lost all of our combo packages and had to rewrite the rewards structure from scratch, eliminating almost all of the school and scout programs, because they weren't individual point of purchase, but organization related, they also destroyed whole swaths of our buy one give one and school sponsor programs and teacher combination packs which has left us struggling to make our lowered goal. Essentially it settled down to no combos with 10 or more of 1 item, which wasn't terrible, but left us with some marketing troubles.
We also had to go back and redo all of our media, video and image from scratch, as they would not allow ANY renders of any type, even for illustrative purposes and that even included a large back and forth about the fritzing illustrations that we had, we literally had to go to bat for the world to convince kickstarter that illustrations had to be part of their new policy, in addition to photos only, and we won that battle.
Overall the new rules gutted our plans, but make sense when all is worked out, it just sucked to be the trailblazer, when it was clear that our Kickstarter handler, who was awesome, didn't even have a firm grasp, nor I expect did anyone else there, on what the shifting policy meant in those first days.
http://kck.st/WbiSck
On to the OutRigger. the BZB has an Arduino built into the breadboard, with a center inline set of the standard pinouts. This is great for many project where you don't need shield compatibility, but when you are ready to take the modular design of the BZB to the next level and begin working with shields in your projects also, thats where the Outrigger IO port and the Outrigger Shield Extender come into play.
The Outrigger IO port is a 28 pin standardized female connector on the bottom of the BZB, that gives you access to all of the pinouts, power and communication from the built in Arduino compatible microcontroller. There are a number of accessories that can plug into this port, or you can just plug the BZB breadboard into say, your OutRigger enabled robot platform directly.
The Shield Extender uses that port to allow you to use all Arduino compatible shields, but in addition has an extra set of "normal" pitch male headers so that you can also work with things like perfboard plugged in. This is great for prototyping before you are ready to do a full PCB layout or production (something some people never get to) with the offset headers. So if you wanted to develop a shield you wouldn't need a specialized, protoboard pcb, bought for that specific purpose and only able to be used once, before having to buy another, you could use much less expensive and more easily attainable perfboard.
If you didn't need shield compatibility, but wanted to build a large perfboard circuit, you could skip the Shield Extender completely and just interface directly with the OutRigger IO port bridging the gap between both solderless and your soldered projects.
Thats the strongest advantage to the BZB Breadboard with built in Arduino, because it is a modular design that can be configured many different ways, it can grow and shrink with your needs for your creation, project or invention.
Hope that explains what the OutRigger IO port and the OutRigger Shield Extender that plugs into it does more clearly.
Feel free to ask away on anything else I may answer and please be sure to visit http://kck.st/WbiSck and share the BZB Breadboard with built In Arduino kickstarter, with your friends family and fellow tinkerers
BOZ