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You thought you'd finished didn't you?
Posted by Chris
on
Monday, October 26, 2009
It's the killer question, loaded with malice and intent. What do you mean "you thought you'd finished?". Just because the question has been asked, you know it's not finished.
The ScoreSure range of devices are almost ready to pop into an enclosure and put onto the shelves, just in time for Xmas. (in fact, they probably wouldn't be anywhere near ready for putting onto shelves, but making them in small batches and shipping them out for mail order might be a possibility). All that's left to do is to put all those delicate bits of electronic trickery into a nice plastic box and we're done.
After a bit of emailing around, it seems that the most cost effective way to achieve this is to use an existing enclosure. i.e. find something that uses a Nokia display, battery, eeprom and microcontroller already, and replace the gubbins with the ScoreSure contents. Easy.
The thing is, once we'd found something like this (a cheap LCD keychain for example) the end product is in danger of looking like an, erm, well... a cheap LCD keychain. And given that the cost of producing each ScoreSure device is much, much more than the retail cost of an LCD keychain, it would be difficult to convince customers to part with their hard-earned for something that looked like a, erm, cheap and nasty LCD keychain! So just at the final hurdle, we've hit hit upon (yet) another problem.
How to make something at a reasonable cost, but make it look like a top-end product.
Enter, our old friend Xing from NuElectronics. Luckily, he's interested in helping us out, not just in finding an enclosure, but in sourcing and assembling the ScoreSure device and he's found some lovely pocket-sized digital photo albums, complete with luxury leather-effect wallets!
So now all we need to do is find out what type/model screen it uses (apparently, it's a nice big QVGA 320x240 full-colour jobbie) and replace it's guts with our own MCU, eeprom and battery charge circuit and we're done.
Oh yeah, and re-write the code to work with this new, bigger display.
And since we've a nice big screen, it'd be a shame not to use it, so perhaps rewrite the font bitmaps so they're not so little and fiddly.
And if we can work out how to use a bigger eeprom, it'd be nice to get full-colour graphics instead of the monochrome ones we're using now.
So in short, once we've started all over again from scratch, spent a few weeks learning how to use the new hardware, then re-written all the microcontroller code to use a three-button interface instead of a micro joystick, we shouldn't be too far off having a working prototype.......
The ScoreSure range of devices are almost ready to pop into an enclosure and put onto the shelves, just in time for Xmas. (in fact, they probably wouldn't be anywhere near ready for putting onto shelves, but making them in small batches and shipping them out for mail order might be a possibility). All that's left to do is to put all those delicate bits of electronic trickery into a nice plastic box and we're done.
After a bit of emailing around, it seems that the most cost effective way to achieve this is to use an existing enclosure. i.e. find something that uses a Nokia display, battery, eeprom and microcontroller already, and replace the gubbins with the ScoreSure contents. Easy.
The thing is, once we'd found something like this (a cheap LCD keychain for example) the end product is in danger of looking like an, erm, well... a cheap LCD keychain. And given that the cost of producing each ScoreSure device is much, much more than the retail cost of an LCD keychain, it would be difficult to convince customers to part with their hard-earned for something that looked like a, erm, cheap and nasty LCD keychain! So just at the final hurdle, we've hit hit upon (yet) another problem.
How to make something at a reasonable cost, but make it look like a top-end product.
Enter, our old friend Xing from NuElectronics. Luckily, he's interested in helping us out, not just in finding an enclosure, but in sourcing and assembling the ScoreSure device and he's found some lovely pocket-sized digital photo albums, complete with luxury leather-effect wallets!
So now all we need to do is find out what type/model screen it uses (apparently, it's a nice big QVGA 320x240 full-colour jobbie) and replace it's guts with our own MCU, eeprom and battery charge circuit and we're done.
Oh yeah, and re-write the code to work with this new, bigger display.
And since we've a nice big screen, it'd be a shame not to use it, so perhaps rewrite the font bitmaps so they're not so little and fiddly.
And if we can work out how to use a bigger eeprom, it'd be nice to get full-colour graphics instead of the monochrome ones we're using now.
So in short, once we've started all over again from scratch, spent a few weeks learning how to use the new hardware, then re-written all the microcontroller code to use a three-button interface instead of a micro joystick, we shouldn't be too far off having a working prototype.......
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