Adrian writing this week.
Given that the Totaliser was threatening to soak up all his time with new product development, Arthur re-jigged his workflow to front-load it with some sales and marketing, and then moving on to Totaliser work.
That restored some balance and meant he could ship out a bunch of boards this week, including the replacements for all our earlier-version customers and our first shipment abroad! Shipping outside the UK meant I got to spend a chunk of Monday working out paperwork and poring over Government tariff codes trying to work out where we fit in.
That all sounds rather dull and boring, but sometimes it's half-an-hour of playing around with turning an LED Liverbird into a huge VU-meter and then pulling together a little video of it:
A rough and ready summary of today's distraction
— MCQN Ltd (@MCQN_Ltd) March 26, 2021
🎶 Sound reactive lighting on the @DoESLiverpool liver bird 🐦
Whistles and music captured via a wireless mic, processed with a python script then passed to #WLED running on the #MyBabysGotLED board#ibal223 pic.twitter.com/WjiJqpmHh5
While Arther was moving the product side of MCQN Ltd forwards, I was on client work.
The new project I was prepping for last week kicked off with some initial background research. It's some follow-on work with a previous client that started back in 2016—this is the third round of scaling things up as they expand and put more demands on the earlier work.
We had a videocall user research session for me to see it in use and better understand where the pinch points where, along with discussing with the workers about how they thought it could be improved. That gave some useful direction to my investigations, starting with exploring how quickly we can run various pen plotters.
Thanks to the interests and experiences of the DoES Liverpool community, there are a whole variety of machines available for convenient testing.
Some less blinky progress today too, we borrowed @jackie_pease's pen plotter for some speed tests of how quickly we can get it to write. Looking speedy 🏎️🏁👌#weeknotes #ibal232 pic.twitter.com/kpfJc9ExSB
— MCQN Ltd (@MCQN_Ltd) March 26, 2021