Update: Thursday 9 February 2023 The Supply Chain Crisis has increased prices, and decreased (if not eliminated some) supplies, for the parts used to make the M!nder with. Amongst my various responses, one has been to assemble the PCBs by hand! Ordinarily, populating a PCB with components is carried out by automated machines, allowing accuracy, […]
Amongst the general unavailability of components caused by the Supply Crisis, a near total absence of integrated circuits for rechargeable batteries has caused further delays. As with other components, a common response is to re-engineer. But, this is a customer-facing component, not a deeply internal one; and alternatives are nearly non-existent! On the plus side, […]
Sunday 6 March 2022 Adapting to new components is mostly done. Tests of the enclosure have called for some modification. Supplies and their increased costs remains an issue. Expecting to start sales, in the Vancouver area, sometime in Spring.
Sunday 6 February 2022 Hardware changes forced by the Supply Crisis have resulted in further delays. These are behavioural changes which need to be catered-to by the system. On the plus side, the enclosure is nearly ready. An update to the PCB should arrive in a few weeks. Pre-release is delayed till sometime in March.
Sunday 6 February 2022 The Supply Crisis caused numerous problems. The latest is a behavioural difference in a new piece of hardware that now needs to be catered to. Highly annoying at this late a stage! On the plus side, the enclosure is nearly ready. The metallic components have been prototyped, with some tests remaining. […]
Wednesday 5 January 2022 The engineering of the M!nder is complete, other than for the product’s enclosure. The latter is progressing as of the moment. The Supply Crisis continues to cause delays, and changes in the components chosen in engineering–notably, the micro-controller has had to be changed. It is hoped that the beta can still […]
Just a quick post, because I’ve not posted in a long while. As well as a port to a new micro-controller (something that many firms have to do nowadays, thanks to the Supply Crisis), a new version of the PCB, and a hell of a lot of work on 3D printing, there’ve been many different […]
A report about BikeIndex and on-line sales sites such as facebook, craigslist and OfferUp: Other post-theft indexes I’ve run into include https://bikeindex.org/, http://map.bikewise.org/, https://www.bikeregister.com/stolen-bikes and https://www.stolenride.co.uk/london-stolen-bike-map/. All attempt to help after bicycle theft.
Yeah, the enclosure has gone through more iterations. It’s a typical struggle for an electronics product: The struggles of engineering the hardware and software complete, then the impossibilities of the enclosure begin. The obstacle is capital: While you can work ‘on the side’ to finance the computer engineering, manufacturing of a physical object necessitates a […]
This detailed article on bike theft in the Vancouver area exhibits a Project 529 infographic: There seems to be a bit of a mathematical error in there: If 2 million bikes are stolen annually, and the police recover 100,000, then 5% are recovered, whereas the infographic states that 5% are “returned to owners”. Well, the […]
