MCQN Ltd is a kiloweek old. We had been aiming at the other kiloweek as a point to kick off a new round of weeknote posts, but Chris pointed out that 1024 weeks was a more appropriately digital milestone!

There have been a few notable items since our last updates, if you'll forgive a brief diversion from weeknotes.

Our My Bike's Got LED boards were certified as open hardware by the Open Source Hardware Association and we got to appear on their monthly Show and Tell series to talk about it:

They're also now on sale in our shop!

A bollard made from a long, sturdy rubber base with a vertical pole coming out of the centre. The pole is lit internally from a strip of LED lights that are cycling up and down through a rainbow of colours

Building on My Bike's Got LED is Lightbeam. That uses the board inside a tube to let us make some interactive bollards that we've been using with Bluetooth and Micro:bit boards for games to encourage kids to get out cycling more.

And both the My Bike's Got LED kits and the Lightbeam tubes were put to good use when we helped Stealing Sheep light up their bike-ride listening party to launch their latest album.

From @stealingsheep on Instagram

Back to this week...

Adrian has been working on the Museum in a Box firmware. We're moving to a new version of the underlying frameworks, which has required pulling together a bit of a dependency matrix: the `esp-adf` works with certain versions of the `esp-idf`, and the `arduino-esp32` versions require a slightly different set of versions of `esp-idf`, but we've worked out which version of each we can move to that has a common base.

Most of the past week has been spent digging into a strange bug where the specific speed of the I2S bus (the bit doing the audio side of Museum in a Box) would interfere with the WiFi!?!! That took quite a bit of spelunking to find, but now he's tidying things up ready to share; and then we can get on with adding some new features and bug fixes.

Inspired by the Natural History Museum collections for Museum in a Box, Chris wanted to push forward the idea of institutions sharing and 3d printing collections. So he made a print your own collection, focusing on uses of Additive manufacturing techniques, as an example. From this we talked about how institutions can make digital models of their artefacts and what approaches we'd recommend. Which is why he's spent most of this week in a Photogrammetry vs 3d scanning rabbit hole. So far he's tested Meshroom, with mobile phone and DSLR captured data, and looked at Kiri Engine.

Next up is trying an Einstar 3d scanner to see how that compares.

Since we were last regularly weeknoting the team has expanded, with Neil Morrin now spending a day a week helping us talk about what we do so people who need our products or services can find us.

When asked to summarize what he's been working on of late he had this to say:

"Being asked to reflect on what I have done always fills me with dread; especially as I feel like a Hit and Run marketing person. Where I rush into a room, do things, add to conversations, push things out the door and then run out the door myself. Keeping balls in the air while pushing at boundaries of what the organisation feels comfortable doing.

So, let's reflect..... when you start anything, it is all about grabbing threads and trying to hold onto them - receive too many threads and they start slipping from your hands, but enough of my life examination, let's talk Marketing - Helping to get product out the door and raise awareness of it, is what feeds you. I think the most fun thing we have done in the time that I have been helping out is helping with the My Bikes Got LED soldering workshop and then the fitting of the lights. It was lovely to see people coming into the workspace and getting their hands on creating circuit boards and then later a different bunch of people having them fitted to their bikes. That was quite an illuminating bike ride!!!

It has been brilliant learning about and working on Museum in a Box - I always like finding out how a bit of kit works. But also, the whole process from purchase, setting up and posting out. Nothing to do with marketing per se, but if I can make a process easier for customers and give them the information they require before buying then I am simply oiling the wheels of commerce. I help demonstrate the boxes through the socials, again a bit of awareness raising and producing some good quality case studies really help act as demonstrations of some of the cool projects that clients are running with MiaB.

What's next .... well, more of the same (hopefully not dropping threads), but more MCQN Ltd work - looking at this website and seeing how we can improve it so it is more user focused and help promote the services offered. Eeek, I better get on with that."