Fittingly, the first non-perfunctory post on this blog should be about the journey to this point.
But, it will take as many pages to write as it took years to get to here.
Therefore, I will post intermittently, hopefully completing the picture over time.

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Back in June 2016, my latest idea for a product arose. I was looking for something that

• did not need external funding;
• could hopefully be self-funded;
• would not require a team;
• was independent of anyone else’s platform–IOW, no apps or some such!

I’d researched enough about (and somewhat dealt with) the whole start-up religion of accelerators/incubators and investors that I had no intention of dancing to that tune!

And my life has always been so removed from most techies’ that I simply did not (and do not) think within the bounds of typical, techie product-ideas.

The idea of an embedded system that tackles bike theft is an obvious one–as were a million others! But, the technical challenges were far more than I could have imagined.

The problems were not in my core expertise, which is firmware; rather, they were in acoustics, and analogue audio-amplification. Of the last five years, a whole year or two were simply abandoned because I’d given up on viability. And, indeed, several obstacles were abandoned–either because I did not have the expertise, or because I could not afford to sub-contract them, or because the resulting solutions would not have been acceptable to consumers, or due to a combination of those.

Even within my area of specialization, I hit so many insurmountable obstacles that I came to call the whole process “10,000 Mountains”. As I said to my room-mate:

It’s like you’re climbing a tall mountain: You struggle, keeping your sight upon the peak; but, when you summit, you find there is another mountain, just like it, right behind!

And there are ten thousand of those! I gave up many times. Now, with nearly the entire technology complete, the problems of turning the device into a product are/were even more insurmountable. (The last time I completely gave up was Tuesday!) It’s like the last 1,000 mountains are Everests!