Now
A brief overview of my activities and focus of the past few months. You can also read more about the now page concept.
Last updated on December 22, 2023.
I don’t foresee any significant availability for new client projects in the near future, but don’t let that stop you from saying hello anyway.
Travel
In the last quarter of 2023, I went to Cape Cod for family, Pasadena for Hackaday Supercon, Winnipeg for a client, and The Netherlands and Belgium for vacation — both ocean coasts of the US and three other countries. I’m staying put for a while, with no concrete travel plans for the foreesable future.
Catch the Wave!
I staffed the Girl Scouts of Oregon & SW Washington’s STEM Day in November, which was really rewarding. I’d estimate close to 1,000 kids came through the fair and had a look and play. I need to get to photographing and documenting what the project actually is better — on this and all of my projects in general. But my goal of a museum-calibre build has been met, at least. Things held up well to kid use and I got so many great compliments on the concept and execution.
Holiday ornament
Since making the original in 2020, I’ve wanted to revisit my PCB holiday ornament as a saleable product. I spent a little time before Europe updating the design to be year-agnostic, then ordering parts and supplies for twenty-five pieces. During the trip, I opened a Tindie store and between that and a few in-person sales, sold out within a week. The day after I got back, I began organizing, assembling, hardware programming, and fulfilling orders. I actually turned a (minimal) profit — if you don’t factor in labor at all, which was not insignificant. But it was a great exercise and the realization of a dream I’ve had since I started making instead of only programming — to sell my own product to real, live strangers out there in the world. I was also really happy with how easy it was to get the word out about the project. I plan to do it every year, probably in larger runs, with plenty of lessons to apply to my planning, my process, my overheads, and my pricing.
Next up
Speaking of communicating about my projects, I’ve been in a bit of a funk as to how to put my main project, the thing borne of the early pandemic that I have been working on for three and a half years, out there in a form that people can begin to learn about. It is also a consumer electronics product, and it has grown to be such a large thing that I struggle with how to even announce what it is and when it will be ready. I’ve started recently working on a sort of R&D wiki-like site as a way to capture how much time and research and learning has gone into the space, and I am hoping that that can be in a state very soon that I can release as a first step. I take a lot of comfort in this post by Siddhesh.
You should make a deadline for your projects so that you’ll actually finish them, but you shouldn’t really, because only then will they grow into something you want, but then you might never finish them in the first place, so who the hell knows what you should do.
So, hopefully, more soon.