April and May 2015
I’m just back from vacation. I thought I’d have lots of time and energy to write blog posts. Ha! Haha. Hahahaha. Open bar. This is a post about the amazing couple of months we’ve had this year and the plans for the immediate future.
Business growth
Wow! Thank you all so much. This month blew the doors off last year’s record. I thought I was ready to go on vacation with lots of kits packed and ready to drop ship, but two days before I left the lot sold in a bulk deal. My PA had to scramble all over town to find parts and keep the machine a runnin’ while I was gone. It’s a pity my nephew has to go back to school or I’d be paying him to laser cut and pack more kits right now.
Now that I’m back I’m starting the process of incorporating. Yes, this little hobby of mine is grown up *sniff sniff*. I’m told that here in Canada the government will pay corporations to try things that fail. I fail at things every day! Sometimes I even fail to fail. Long story short: corporate tax loopholes, evil empire, super villainy, word association football.
Maker Faires
Middle of May is the Bay Area Maker Faire. I will be there with many of my friends who are makers, showing off our latest and greatest. Come out and say hi, get some hands on with the Makelangelo, and maybe play a very hard, very tiny game of Tetris. It’s just one of the many events I’ll be at this year. So far the schedule also includes
- Bay Area Maker Faire May 16-17, 2015
- Vancouver June 6-7, 2015
- Seattle September 19-20, 2015, and
- New York September 26-27, 2015
Got a fair, gathering, or conference you think I should attend? Let me know. I’m open to the idea of attending a European Maker Faire like Rome, Paris, or London if the price is right. I’ve always wanted to visit Japan, so maybe Tokyo is in the cards, too.
New Products
I’ve got thirty Arduino Starter Kits packed in the warehouse and now I’m working on the photography and the product description. Expect more tutorials in the coming weeks.
In the coming two months I’m trying to finish my gearbox. I’ve written about it a bit over on Hackaday.io. The first prototype was a good try, the second will be better, and if I’m really lucky we’ll get something working in time for the BAMF. The bottleneck right now is in tweaking the designs before they go to the machinist.
In the meantime I’m switching off to other projects. I’ve just converted the dev branch of Makelangelo to draw all the graphics with OpenGL with JOGL. Once all my robot softwares are in the same framework it will mean more features for you and less work for me.
Let’s make a deal
I have R&D projects planned out from here to the end of the year, so if you ask me “can you make custom robot X?” be sure to include “My budget is Y.” Let me know you’re serious and that it’s worth my while. I’m overstocked on great ideas and understocked on time and hands. If your project pays enough so I can hire someone else to do my other projects then we might just have a deal.
The reseller/distributor program is a big hit and has really taken off. We’ll be automating the pricing so you will all know you’re getting the same deal, fair and square. Now to get more schools and makerspaces involved.
Final thought
Alright, that’s my brain dump for the day. Now that I’ve reviewed where I’m at and where I want to be I can get down to the grindstone and make some of this happen. First, tho, my managers are insisting on an off-site meeting. You might know them from our instagram feed: they’re about 5kg each and have eight furry legs between the two of them.
