A good few weeks.

Selworthy‘s handover continues. I’ve been working with a sysadmin to really get the servers shipshape, and easier to build on for the future. That’s involved going over most of my Ansible scripts and updating them as appropriate. Fortunately, there’s been very little replace, and we’ve made steady improvements and additions. We’ve also really stepped up the monitoring and alerting. I’ve also been working on rolling some more bugfixes out to live environments, and assisting the new development team in taking over the product. They seem to be making good inroads, and I hope that’ll continue.

Twinklr’s also seen lots of progress. The end of week 176 saw the final crit for the project, and I buckled down to deliver an end-to-end demo there. That meant building up the electronics once the PCBs arrived and then cutting the case and assembling the whole thing.

There were some bumpy moments: I think I overreached a tad on the electronics, and there are some noise and power issues I need to resolve, but they were rough edges rather than complete blockers. By the crit, we had a working, standalone Twinklr, all boxed up neatly and transported in a flightcase. The crit went well: it was great to demo a fully working object, and now I’m focusing on sanding off the rough edges, and pull together an installation for the showcase in early June – where you’ll be able to see Twinklr in the flesh. You can see some of the progress right now over at the Tumblr I’ve been keeping during the project.

Also, if you’re wondering what Twinklr feels like to use: we’ve now got a film of the version we completed last year. The version I’ve been building for the past five/six months has several new features, and a somewhat different construction (not to mention one that’s entirely computer controlled) – but it shows the germ of the idea.