Posts tagged as blackdown

  • Week 212

    16 January 2017

    Focuses for Week 212:

    • Good Night Lamp – I spent some time patching and adding features to the tooling I’m working on following feedback from the team who are going to be using it.
    • Selworthy – spent a couple of days wrapping up features from the end of 2016, fixing some bugs, and starting a minor UI overhaul of some key functionality.
    • Spent an afternoon workshopping with doteveryone – hopefully more to say about that in due course.
    • Longcrag – redesigned lots of frontpanels to correctly fit jack sockets, and to use vector logos throughout. I redesigned a possible product for the second phase of releases, wrote some more documentation, and wrestled with some firmware for a prototype – which got to a good place by the time I was done.

    A busy first full week, spread between a range of clients and my own work.

  • Weeks 210-211

    9 January 2017

    I was out for all of Week 210, because it was Christmas and New Year, and downing tools is very important (and necessary). Turned out to be an excellent break.

    Then, in week 211, I spent much of the time ramping back up for 2017 – thinking a bit about what’s to come in the year, working on some small projects and continuing my own product development work. To that end:

    I spent some time really pushing Longcrag on. I built up a new prototype on a breadboard, and it proved markedly superior to an existing one, so I’m probably scrapping one of the five products under the Longcrag umbrella and replacing it with this one.

    I also spent some time continuing to plan out packaging approaches. This was helped by inheriting a surprisingly good USB thermal printer from Tim at Sensible Object (who are upstairs from me), and using this to prototype labels. That’s going to work well, I think.

    The final 10% of Longcrag is taking frustratingly long – it’s lots of small bits that need pushing forward – but it’s going to be good, I think, and right now, I’m trying to emulate the best producers I’ve worked with in terms of thinking how to get stuff into the world.

    I also spent some time in the ramp-up to 2017 working on Blackdown, the follow-up product to Longcrag. I spent an afternoon really prodding the firmware for Blackdown, and made a lot of progress – both in that it functions correctly, and in that it functions interestingly. My investment in the oscilloscope last year once again paid off – the usability and clarity of good tools is always a reward, and in this case, it made possible observing critical timing in the order of milliseconds (and quantifying the drop in latency as I optimised code). I’m really excited with where this object could go.

    Finally, I continued my work on tooling for Good Night Lamp. That meant getting the tools live into a production environment, adding some more features, fettling bugs, and talking to the team about their needs and then doing the best to integrate a minimal version of their current process into the tool. It’s coming to life nicely.

    Over the weekend, as is often the case, I sat down and thought about goals (rather than resolutions) for 2017. Some of those are work-related, and I feel like I’m going to be reviewing them roughly quarterly to see what I’ve done, what’s likely to prove impossible, and what needs to be added.

    For now, though: onwards!

  • Week 89

    28 June 2014

    A quiet week carving away at Lewesdon: working out what it is and what it needs. After last week’s long explanation, there’s not so much to say this week: I’ve just been head down, trying to work out what the product is, moving it forward by writing and drawing.

    I’ve described this process as being like pitching myself: telling myself a story, and then listening to see if it makes sense. When it doesn’t, I reframe it. There have been a few useful breakthroughs in my thinking, which usually generate as many questions as answers, but I think that’s good right now. The team are slowly feeling more confident in the ideas I’m putting forward to them, and we’ve begun to ask a few people who are likely to be impacted by the product for initial feedback.

    The project I call Lewesdon is, incidentally, Swarmize – a data capture and aggregation platform at the largest scale. The Knight Foundation have now announced the grants, so it’s only reasonable to mention its real name here.

    It’s moving forward, and I hope, swiftly enough – but my time leaps between observing, making, observing, making, and it’s tough work to balance it all and not lose momentum.

    On Wednesday, a brief meeting set up Blackdown, a three-day workshop for CreateInnovate that I’ll be running alongside David Varela. I mentored briefly on this project last year, and am looking forward to three days with some filmmakers to explore what online projects could do for them. I’m also really looking forward to finally working with David.

    But mainly, pushing Lewesdon forward, digging with my Wacom stylus, and pushing onwards.