Adrian here again.
Having pulled our main product from sale last week, my focus this week was more testing of the board and then working up a fix.
We'd already worked out that pushing over 10A through the typical Neopixel wiring was too much for it. The solution to that is to provide a number of power feeds so that doubled- or tripled-up so there is less current flowing over any individual wire. Then we can protect each of those with its own fuse, which can be a much lower value and hence safer.
There's still a point on the PCB though where the full current is flowing. That was something I'd considered in the initial design and had done some initial testing with. Now I had a better test set-up I ran a final test with the power feed shorted with some chunky wire, to maximise the current flow through the circuit board itself. That got pretty warm, but stayed like that for the full six hours of the test.
With that done, I finished reworking the board design to provide three power feeds, each with their own 8A fuse; and added a couple more test points for good measure (I've been thinking more of late about how we can automate some of the testing, and while not essential, they're free to add...).
The order for a batch of the new design went in on Friday. We should be firing up the reflow oven to solder them up in just over a week. Join the waitlist on the My Baby's Got LED Tindie page if you want to be first in line for the new boards when they're ready!
While I was busy with electronics, Arthur continued working out who might buy the boards.
That involved talking to our existing customers and researching likely places that customers might hang out, in order to come up with some initial customer archetypes.
On Friday we had a good planning session—Arthur came armed with spreadsheets, which adds a touch more rigour to my more intuituve approach. That was good for deciding what to focus on, and resulted in him spinning up a new repository to explore a Totaliser concept.
A productive week all round.