One of the trickier parts of running the company is managing the flow of work. That Goldilocks balance of not too much to get overloaded, nor too little to be spinning our wheels. The start and—even more-so—the end of projects are the fuzziest and as a result the transition points are where there's either a gap or an overload.

At the moment there's a confluence of projects and additional calendar deadlines that mean its one of the overload periods.

In the main it's not too bad. I'm pretty good at focusing on the important rather than the urgent, and I know that I need to crank through the work to get it out.

That said, I am looking forward to when the workload drops a bit in a week or so. One of the tasks to pick up again then will be the hunt for new staff to join me. In the meantime though, I've drafted in my friend Snoof for a few days of freelancing. I mean, someone who has an assortment of CNC machines at home is a good fit for the bits of CAD work and assembly tasks to get the pen plotters built!

Pen plotter production continues apace. I also found time to contribute back to the commons as part of it—as the pen holder uses an off-the-shelf linear slide, I added my FreeCAD models for that to the excellent companion project, the FreeCAD-library (which saved my having to model the miniature servo myself). My pull request was accepted in short order, so now those models are available for anyone to use.

We're also in production mode at Aeternum, producing our next batch of air quality sensors. Following on from our experiments with recycling HDPE and finding a better source of (locally manufactured) recycled LDPE we're now machining that. The inital small run we're doing in-house, and will likely outsource it for future runs.