We had the best possible feedback on the signature plotter recently: an order for a bunch more of them.

Annoyingly, we then immediately ran into supply chain issues. The Eleksmaker unit that we used seems impossible to get hold of at the moment. The suppliers we've tried are all either out of stock, or won't ship to the UK. There are a bunch of alternatives around, but in our experience also of varying quality.

I hunted down an alternative and ordered one to try out, before getting some more. It arrived last week and so I spent an afternoon putting it together. I want to get it up and running under its own power before making the final decision to order more, but so far so good...

The gantry on this one runs along the longer side, and there isn't an off-the-shelf pen holder available, so there'll be a bit more development work to do during the builds.

On the MCQN Ltd product side of things, we posted a My Baby's Got LED kit and a prototype Ackers Bell down to our friends at Factoree. They were off to a Green Roof Hackathon for the weekend, and wanted to experiment with some IoT output devices to pair with the sensors they'd be installing and prototyping with.

Programming the My Baby's Got LED board to send down required me to use the programming jig, which gave me the excuse/reason/nudge to move its development on a step. I got the new power-switch circuit built up, so now the script can power up the board correctly when it comes to program it. Deadline-driven development all the way...