Fortnight-notes this time, as I (Adrian) was a bit too busy finishing off slides to get the weeknotes out last week. More on that in a moment.

Chris is still very much lost in the world of websockets in the ESP-IDF web server for the Museum in a Box GUI. There has been some distraction by ESPAsyncWebServer which offers a bit more functionality but at the expense of an additional component to the project.

He’s also been chasing component suppliers for new boards for a client, and got them tracked down and the order placed at the end of last week. In amongst that a flurry of Museum in a Box orders had him coding and packaging new boxes to be sent out into the wild.

Neil had a serious week of dealving into archives; normally this would involving popping along to the City libary but in this case it has meant reading old Museum in a Box website articles and reviewing Vimeo videos. The hard part was working out how to download the videos to repackage them as Instagram reels.

I’ve also been in something approaching archive mode some of these weeks. The Royal Mint Museum have a fleet of 76 Museums in Boxes, that they send all over the UK to care homes to let them run reminiscence sessions. They’ve done over 1600 trips, making them the most-travelled Boxes out there.

Naturally, with that much use some of the Boxes have picked up the odd knock or fault. The week before last we received a shipment of poorly Boxes back at HQ for us to attend to. I’m steadily working through them, looking at any software (mostly failing micro-SD cards) or electronics issues first; and setting aside the ones that need new case panels—we’ll do a batch of laser-cutting for those repairs at the end.

An open cardboard box showing a collection of Museum in a Box boxes inside: a couple of transparent ones, a yellow one, a black one and a wooden one. The front of the wooden one can just be seen to not be connected to the rest of the box, and in a corner there's a seemingly flat-packed version reduced to its component parts

Neil and I also spent an evening cycling around Crosby and Liverpool. That’s not in itself all that unusual, but this time we hitting up a few locations we thought might work well for some filming of My Bike’s Got LED.

Neil had the Insta360 and GoPro cameras set up on his bike so he could then film my bike, with its LEDs, as I rode by. Here’s a sneak peek of a bit of what we captured:

We’ve now got thirty-plus gigabytes of footage to sort through and edit down. Most of it will end up on the cutting room floor, but it should give us most of what we’re after. We’re expecting to film a couple more close-up bits, but they can be done outside the office. It’ll be our secret, okay?

Editing the video has been pushed back for now, as I had a deadline for last week.

As I mentioned at the start, I had some slides to prepare for a talk. Jo Hinchliffe arranged an evening of talks over in Bethesda last Wednesday evening, and asked me to talk about what we get up to at MCQN. We took my bike and a Museum in a Box over the border into North Wales for a delightful evening of talks.

I spoke about how there are other ways of running a tech business than the venture capital backed exit chasing “startup” and “scaleup” model. I illustrated it with a look at how our explorations into a variety of RFID and NFC technology grew over a few years into Museum in a Box; and then showed how our bike-related projects and products have co-evolved with the cycling community that we’re a part of.

Chris spoke at the event too, but with his STEAM Engineers hat on—sharing details of their Spoonbot and his fresh-from-the-fab-house underwater rover control board.

It was a great trip. Jo has written it up over on his blog. I’ll share my slides once I’ve written some narrative to go round them (that at least resembles what I said…)