• Weeks 244-245

    4 September 2017

    A good couple of weeks.

    I’m working on a second production run of Foxfield products. I’ve got all the PCBs and panels already – all that remained to do was order up the components for the kits. These all arrived and in week 245, I started packaging up the second run. I’m halfway through after a day or so’s work.

    I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on the course material for the circuit board design course I’m running in October. That’s been going well, too – working out what we’ll be doing, testing out my teaching material, making sure we have a good combination of practical exercises and some short talks.

    I also confirmed details of a workshop later in the month in Newcastle for film-makers (and primarily artist-filmmakers):

    Aimed at artists and filmmakers this session will explore two core topics: using technology as a means of developing artistic and creative practice; and using the internet to develop audiences for your work in the ways most appropriate for it.

    Always pleasant to work with Northern Film – I’ve done a few courses with them before – so I’ll be working on bashing this into shape shortly.

    I ordered up some Longcrag prototypes to get made whilst I’m away on holiday for the next two weeks – hopefully they’ll be the production prototypes for a few new products to get made before the end of the year.

    I’ve started some explorations into Silicon Labs microcontroller hardware – trying to get away from writing Arduino-based C and into something that might be more suitable for production products. The world of firmware programming is a bit hairy, but this is easing me in moderately slowly, and I hope to spend a little more time with it in the coming months.

    And finally, over on Selworthy, I had a meaty, big breakthrough: the large feature I’ve been hacking on all summer suddenly came into focus and, frankly, works. It changes some of the core concepts within the system and the net result it was aiming for had really paid off. Really pleased – it’s been a brain-twisting few months, and I now know more about frame-rates than I ever imagined possible.

    And with that: I’m off on a proper vacation. Back Week 247; see you then.