I've ignored most of the unprofessionalism brought upon by the makerbuino company but I find myself quite unhappy at this moment and I can't help but place most of the blame, not all but most, one the makerbuino company.
First off, I don't really thing I need to highlight the fact that I received my product 2 months past the date I was promised, but as I find myself with a broken voltage regulator, I grimace in the thought of just how long it'll take to get a new one sent to me. I understand there were issues and that they didn't think about how hard distribution would be but I think some of it could have been avoided. Hell they pushed back delivery by 15 days and then 25 because the screens weren't in but they had an idea of how much they needed for backing so they should have order a general amount of parts as soon as they were backed.
Secondly they've had terrible communication with their customers. Sparse, random updates are something that probably annoyed a lot of people. I'm sure the company lost quite a bit of their initial money because people felt they might have been scammed as I found myself thinking every so often. I don't know if anyone else has noticed or not but the community.makerbuino.com site is completely gone. There was no mention that the initial forum had moved to this site. In fact, the paper inside the kit tells me to go to learn.makerbuino.com for the tutorial on how to build my makerbuino. If you check, the site does not exist.
Along with that, they did an absolutely horrendous, god awful job of helping their community. Moving the tutorial was fine because a quick google search brought me to the proper site. That being said, it was stupid, absolutely terrible in how it was done. First off they use multiple boards throughout the entire soldering process, all with a different thing soldered on. Some have switches already attached, some don't. Some already had resistors, some didn't. If this was my first time assembling an electronics kit, I wouldn't have been able to do it because I'd get to one picture of the board and see three resistors I haven't put up yet along with capacitors. Apparently it didn't help that I already had experience because although I knew where all the resistors went, along with the capacitors, I mixed up the voltage regulator and the transistor because I went ahead and soldered every switch and button since the pictures had them on the board even before they said to do so. Also a multi-meter is required since they give the color band color code for a 4 band resistor and it ships with 5 band resistors. Also there are no M2 screws and nuts like the tutorial said, I did find 5 smaller screwes but they weren't long enough to go from the hole of the screen though the hole of the pcb. I'm assuming they are supposed to serve the same purpose but only after a lot of brute force did it sort of kind of work. And I think that's a pretty good representation of the company thus far, sort of kind of, hodgepodged, half-a**ed piece of work. They have atleast 4 different colored boards, why did they ship me a red board with blue caps? Why wasn't that something I could pick? Why can't they update and fix their tutorials to suite the needs of what they are shipping to customers? Why can't they tell their consumers what is going on, the fact they are moving url's, etc. I know this kid is 18, but he is promising a product to people who are paying good money, lots of money, to receive it, and it honestly feels like a rip off. I wish I could turn to this company to help with the fact that I need to replace the voltage regulator but I only have a few weeks before I go off to college and I can't wait 2 months for replacement parts. I have no idea if I fried the microcontroller by flipping the regulator and transistor. I may have to replace that too.
Bottom line, until someone takes over this company that knows how to deal with consumers, that knows how to give and take feed back, I don't think makerbuino will last very long. I think an 18 decided that he had a product and wanted to share it to the rest of the world and thought all he had to do was start a kickstarter and everything would magically work out. It might get better, it might get worse. I think he's in over his head. Just beware everyone, makerbuino may not last much longer.