Swans look serene above the water...
...but a lot of paddling goes on out of sight!
Wednesday next week should see another milestone in the development of the SleepBreeze personal cooler.
The long anticpated "sock" should arrive in the UK. This has caused us endless problems in translating Jill's prototype into a manufacturable item. One company gave up, then a second. We bit the bullet last week and made some design changes, bringing the design much more in line with Jill's version than the manufacturers had attempted. So fingers crossed, as this has been holding up progress for some weeks now.
Last week the finished finger guard arrived - the tool has been cleaned and we now have samples of this component as you'll see it in the finished product.
More exciting news is that a tooling component used to make a keypad recess in the product is nearing completion. A lot of thought has gone into this component. We wanted to have the keypad flush with the rest of the product.
Why? Well, we know that the product will be used in nursing homes and hospitals. With infection control being a big issue in the UK we wanted to design out unncessary nooks and crannies where MRSA bugs could breed. The obvious place to concentrate was the area around the control keypad - where users would touch the product most often. Our design will allow a simple wipe clean surface, leaving little room for grime to build up. A small touch, but we thought it would be a nice touch.
Testing of the firmware within the PCB controller is nearing completion. David Ing has built numerous layers of safety related features into the code. So, it's nearly time for me to start seeing if I can "break" David's control coding in a way that he hasn't forseen. These pieces of code complement the inherent safety features built into the physical electronic components from Emma Blaken's original PCB design.
So, by next Wednesday we should have all the components - albeit some in prototype form. At long last we'll be able to put everything together and see what final changes are needed.
Meanwhile, I'll be working on building and testing our online store. More about that another time.
Andy