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February 12, 2024

“Hardware Time!”

Day

8

7:49 AM

Last week was software; this week (the first part, at least) will be hardware.

I’m mostly set up to start tinkering. This is, in many ways, a less complex problem than on the server side, so I expect it only to take a couple of days. Then I should have a working proof of concept for the simplest version of the product.

After that I will likely design an actual early prototype (rather than the hack job PoC I’m working on right now). That will allow me to send the electronics off to be made while I start working on the physical casing (which I expect to be one of the harder parts). If I can get the physical case together, I’ll have a nice prototype.

From there it will likely be on to one of two areas: either the business side of things (including creating said business!), or additional design work toward the first production version.

For reference purposes, these are some of the things that will need to be researched and/or pursued:

  • Set up the business legally
  • Finish the PoC to prove the concept
  • Design and manufacture the prototype
  • Put an actual UI on the software side, plus expand the feature set
  • FCC certification since it contains WiFi
  • Packaging
  • General manufacturing matters (eg. firmware loading)
  • Marketing
  • Banking (eg. accepting credit cards)
  • …

Yeah, the list goes on.

Guess I’d better get to work…

9:52 AM

Productive morning so far. I have the device running and registering with the server. No complaints on that score.

Going to get breakfast, then back at it…

12:51 PM

Scaffolding. Fun. Not. It’s past lunch time. I’m going to lunch.

4:30 PM

Well, other than finding bugs in last week’s work (and I swear, they grew over the weekend – there’s no way they were there before!), it looks like things are going very well. I have a take on the firmware, and it actually, y’know… works.

It’s missing a few things like TLS and some of the more advanced functionality I eventually want to add, but it actually works!

I think that’s a good place to leave the hardware for today. Tomorrow I’ll need to squash the bugs I found in the server side, and then… it should be Good Enough™ for this phase of things.

A great start to the week!