We’ve been pushing forwards on a few fronts this week. No major breakthroughs, just nudging things along on a few different projects.

With us nearing the end of this batch of Museum in a Box Chris has been checking over the last few boxes to make sure they’re all good to ship out. With any production batch there’ll be the odd issue here and there. When we’ve got the full batch those QA anomalies get put to one side for us to investigate and re-work later. Now we’re at that later. There were one or two still irretrievable after Chris’ attentions (we order a few more than we need in the production batch, to handle such eventualities) but he’s gotten enough PCBs tidied up to see us through. We need to order a couple of micro-SD cards too, which I (Adrian) will get to this week.

Last week I threatened to break out the oscilloscope to work out why I couldn’t get any code onto the new Hexanoodle prototypes. In the end the threat of it sitting on the desk next to the board was enough. Or maybe it was the break between attempts that let me spot I’d wired up the programming dongle incorrectly. Either way, I can get code onto the CH32V203 chip and the boards work!

A green PCB sits on a cutting mat. A USB cable is plugged into it and a pair of wires come out of the other side of the board to an orange LED noodle. A switch next to the USB cable gets switched on and the LED noodle lights up bright pink and flashes on and off at half-second intervals

The My Bike’s Got LED product work moved on a bit further too. I finished off the design work in FreeCAD with an assortment of fold up tabs added to the design we shared last week:

A screengrab of FreeCAD showing a red PCB (exported from Kicad, so missing a few components but has the important bits for this design work) sat on a folded cardboard (though it's not totally clear from the render that that's the case) insert with a green rectangular box (which will also be cardboard in reality, and so not green, but it makes it easier to differentiate it) sandwiched in between. The cardboard insert is rectangular with flaps folded down at either side, providing a void below it for a saddlebag (not pictured, that's far too tricky for me to bother drawing up in CAD!); the (green) battery box sits on top of that; and then a flap at the front of the insert folds up and round to wrap the battery box and provide a platform for the red PCB to sit on.

With the design finished—at least to a point where we can try making one—I got FreeCAD to unfold the design and save it as an SVG; that will then go into the laser-cutter software to let us cut one to test.

Another screengrab of FreeCAD. This shows the same design as above but with the cardboard insert unfolded. It's flattened down to a sort of cross shape with some three-sides-of-a-rectangle shapes cut into it. Next to it is a wire-frame of the same design with the outline in blue, the three-sides-of-a-rectangle shapes in orange, and dotted lines in red showing where the folds are. This is the part ready to feed to the laser-cutter.

Finally, I found time to write up the Active Travel Hackday that we ran a few weeks ago.