Update for the week ending on Friday, Jul 31, 2020
TinyPilot
- Shipped out 4 new completed units
- I should have shipped out 20+ but I made a dumb screwup reading a product listing
- How I read it
- How I was supposed to read it
- So I thought I was ordering 40 microSD cards, but I actually only ordered 4
- Fortunately, microSD cards ship pretty fast on Amazon, so I got 40 today and expect the rest of what I need tomorrow or Monday
- I should have shipped out 20+ but I made a dumb screwup reading a product listing
- Packed 7 completed units, shipping out tomorrow
- On track to clear my order backlog by Tuesday or Wednesday
- Switched from Stripe to Shopify
- Huge improvement, so I tweetstormed about it
- Still a lot of manual work in migrating orders from Stripe to Shopify, but hopefully I got it all sucessfully
- LOTS of logistics planning and managing inventory
- At any given time, I’ve got 10-12 different shipments in transit to me (parts of the kit, packing supplies, different equipment I’d like to experiment with).
- Evaluated a few options for inventory management software
- The problem is that simple inventory tools don’t support the concept of raw materials or “kitting” (i.e. to sell product A, I need parts X, Y, and Z)
- Inventory tools that do support “kitting” are super complicated and assume that you have multiple warehouses and transfer orders and shipping receipts.
- The closest match I could find was Stock & Buy, which is pretty complicated but the version I need costs $80/month. I’ll revisit if inventory continues to be a problem after this initial rush.
- Also tried Zoho Inventory - free but terrible
- Also tried Odoo - also free, also pretty terrible.
- Tweetstormed a bunch of scaling issues I’m running into with shipping physical goods.
- Made my first freelancer hire (my girlfriend)
- I’m struggling to keep up with shipping, and she’s looking for flexible work, so it’s a good match.
- Made a checklist for packing boxes and transferred that task to her.
- Successfully tested an alternate design for TinyPilot that draws full power from the USB-C port instead of relying on GPIO.
- It relies on an obscure cable I can’t source in bulk, so I’ll update the kit once I have enough cables.
- Updated landing page to better integrate the new logo
- Added a teaser page for TinyPilot Pro
- Added a mailing list
- Got 3 subscribers since yesterday
- I feel like I should just absorb the lesson to always add a mailing list to everything even if I can’t think of a reason why people would want to sign up.
- Figured out a way to make a TinyPilot .img file so I can prepare microSD cards in a single step.
- My previous workflow took like 20 minutes per card and involved swapping the microSD between machines for various steps.
- The missing piece for me was using PiShrink, though I’m not sure why it failed when I previously tried writing an unminified image.
- Met with David Williams of Box CI to talk about using BoxCI as a way to run CI for TinyPilot on my own hardware.
- Sent follow-up emails to all the customers who received their devices in the first wave of shipments
- Caught up on backlog of emails from people who reached out around the time of the blog post.
- Wrote some behind the scenes notes on Indie Hackers
- Briefly played around with a BeagleBone as a possible future candidate for TinyPilot’s standard build.
- Adjusted the target resolution from 780p to 1080p.
- Reviewed a PR that added Python packaging support instead of relying on pip to install
requirements.txt. - Fixed a bug that was causing TinyPilot to break if people accessed it by anything but the hostname
- e.g. http://192.168.1.105 or http://tinypilot.local (a Mac thing, I guess?)
- Fixed a bug that was preventing install on 64-bit ARM systems
- I think it still fails, but it’s a little closer to working now.
- Adjusted HID config so that TinyPilot has better compatibility with boot environments.
- Tinkered with nginx settings to reduce spew of warnings in logs.
- Reached out to the owner of the tinypilot.com domain to see if he’s interested in selling.
- Added versioned releases of TinyPilot.
- Documented a VGA adapter that’s confirmed working with TinyPilot.
Is It Keto
- Continued arguing with a merchant who seems to be shortchanging their affiliates (Is It Keto used to be one until I noticed this).
mtlynch.io
- Wrote down most of my notes for The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
- Updated Key Mime Pi and TinyPilot posts to reflect my discovery that the TTL cable I was using only delivers 0.5 Amps instead of the 3 Amps I expected.
Gridsome
In an effort to help Gridsome improve dev velocity, I’ve been volunteering a few hours a week to help manage their documentation.
- Reviewed and merged 4 PRs.
Zestful
- Got RapidAPI to “verify” my API, which I guess is like the equivalent of a blue checkmark on Twitter.
- Usefulness TBD
Beekeeping
- Harvested about 50 lbs of honey