I haven’t really talked about the Trancevibe project in a while. With the whole moving and vacation thing it kind of got shuffled onto the back burner a couple months ago (have I really lived here that long?) and never revived. There’s also this huge uncanny valley between making and selling a couple of something on the down-low to a small-knit community, and making and selling hundreds to thousands of something, as I’m finding out (er…what is this ‘business license‘ of which you speak? Oh yeah, and the FCC and CE are both full of crap). That kind of burns because this project is the first and only time (including going on four years as a professional EE at an actual company) I’ve seen one of my projects with a clear migration path to volume production. I must say, designing widget after widget in order to build two prototypes, write a report on it, then throw them mostly-working into a box never to be seen again seems like a lot of unfulfillingly wasted effort, which gets old. I have a solidly DFM design chain mapped out in my head, a method for small-scale automated machining (for the enclosures), full modularity, automated assembly, application support in mind (beginning with OhMiWinamp, heh…the plugin SDK is still sitting gathering dust on my hard drive), and even eyecandy that’s sure to be a hit (and could be added for under $1.50 per unit).
I’m making (small, incremental…need non-people-time) progress toward picking it back up, but still not sure when that will actually finish. I’ve still got stuff to do on the whole house thing before I can even start unpacking my EE stuff, let alone set up a work bench (let further alone a production facility), and some other projects stacking up besides. Lastly, a new gf, who when I let slip about the existence of this project (which loosely translates to non-EEs as “I sell homemade sex toys on the internet!”), seemed pretty visibly squicked. She’s seeming more tolerant of the concept now, but still…
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