“It feels like an age since Christmas”, “Why can’t we have that ripe brie all the time?”, “No, you put it in the loft I didn’t even want an illuminated reindeer”, “We should probably get some new year weeknotes written” and all the other usual greetings of the new year. So happy new year from MCQN. No prizes for guessing it’s Chris’s turn to write the notes this time, but an on the turn mince pie to the first person who names the band behind the 80s pop song referenced in the title.

A desk at DoES set up to assemble Museum in a Box boxes. In the background is a wall of yellow, pink and black cases with speaker wires hanging out. In the foreground on a green cutting mat are the tools needed to assemble them.

Our big news is the pcb’s for the next batch of Museum in a Box arrived. The shop is back open and we’ve already got boards crossing the country, and the Atlantic.

Julie has joined us to build, flash and pack the next batch and is doing great work gluing, screwing and packing them up ready to go. She’s got a production line system set up that would put Henry Ford to shame. They’re being built in any colour you like as long as it’s black, or pink, or yellow, or blue or transparent. So objectively already five times better before we’ve even started..

This new stock has also triggered Adrian getting involved in a battle with Chilliean government procurement systems to complete an order. In turn this led to a related, and no less confusing, deep dive into the tarrif agreements between the UK and Chilie. He’s also had £150 worth of phone arguments with a certain courier’s USA based AI ‘assistant’ to track down parcels which took months to arrive with a customer. He doesn’t want to talk about it, but the parcels have now arrived.

A black museum in box mainboard connected to a rainbow coloured ribbon of cable. This in turn is connected to some veroboard with pogo pins at the other end. These are being used to back a temporary connection to a Vicino board.

I have been testing a new batch of Vicino boards that we use in the boxes so a chance to pull out the test rig run some checks before the boxes are assembled. Each is checked for performance before the headers are soldering and they are connected to the main board.

We had some very useful feedback on the zine we send with My Bike’s got LED kits, so I also made some time to update these instructions.

Finally, and in anticipation of the influx of new stock I spent some time archiving and sorting some of our office, well there’s a better phrase than acquired junk, but I can’t remember it right now. Everything has been corralled into ‘Archive’, ‘Medium term storage’ and ‘current stock’. While this has generally made the space a little tidier, it’s not helping us track down the nuts and washers we need to connect the potentionmeters to the boxes. The search continues…