Adrian back with the (back-to)-weeknotes this week.

Most of my week was taken up with bits of client work, and a decent chunk of quote preparation for potential client work. It's my least favourite part of work, I think because it's often a blend of defining the problem, estimating how long it will take to solve, and condensing that into something succint and clear for the customer. Explaining all that to you, dear reader, it does sound like a non-trivial amount of work, so I should remember that for next time. Which is this week, as it turns out...

The more obviously (to me) work was our latest session on the teleprinter. It took a pretty big step towards completion this time, as you can find out in the video diary:

Arthur continued with his systematizing and documenting various parts of the sales and marketing activity, to streamline what was—under my supervision—a somewhat haphazard affair.

He's also been thinking about the presentation and impression people get from the My Baby's Got LED board. Our philosophy is to build products that everyone can use, and that plug-and-play approach has governed plenty of the decisions about the board. However, with the variability in power-supply sizes it's tricky to provide a one-size-fits-all option for the housing, and that results in us selling a bare PCB. That's fine for makers, but this is a product aimed more towards those who don't want to think about such things.

As part of that thinking, he built a first-pass at a possible laser-cut mounting option. And as part of that, he made a short video showing the process:

With My Baby's Got LED as our only product available, there are no adjacent more-non-techie-friendly products to mitigate the "it's a circuit board" impression. There are a raft of other products in various stages of completion on the under-developement roster, but a lot of that information has only had to live in my head up to now. We've pulled this out to document the roadmap properly, and are looking to see what's closest to a product launch. That can feed into the time I can devote to new product development.

Some of the product development is guided, as ever, by the client work—if something we're getting paid to develop can help move things on with a product, or inspires something that can develop into a product, it can bring a useful mix of funding and milestones. So some of the product work is opportunistic or agile (if you want a fancier-sounding term...). That's the case with one of the two new product ideas that were added to the roster this week. We'll see if the job comes off before pushing forward with it too far, and the other one has been pushed further down the queue, until we've got some of the existing ideas out into the world.