A fortnight to catch up on since the last weeknotes, so not quite weekly, but better than the last gap!
The PCBs that arrived in Week 265 were soldered up last week. An oversight in checking the voltage rating of a capacitor used in the first test board led to the entire office getting a rather noisy and surprising lesson in what happens to electrolytic capacitors if you exceed their rated voltages, and also led to this addition to one of our whiteboards...
(It's up to 12 days now)
This week I got to spend a morning on the roof of the Innovation Park installing the PCBs, along with their accompanying Arduinos and Ethernet shields and they're monitoring things happily.
The Saturday in the middle of the fortnight Bubblino and I spent in Manchester helping people build robots at Madlab for their one-year-old celebratory Robot Hackday. It's a while since we'd visited and they're really starting to put their stamp onto the building. It was good to catch up with Dave, Hwa Young and Asa who run the Madlab - they're doing an excellent job of encouraging the Manchester tech scene.
Speaking of events, there's been some planning and prep work done for the upcoming Howduino hack-weekend and the fourth Ignite Liverpool.
The rest of the time has been taken up with work for the chicken farm project, and that will carry on into this week too. The farm runs to a very particular schedule, so that's providing some hard dates that we need to hit. It should all come together, but is calling on more of my project management skills as the deadline looms.