We busted open a carton of Squares to test, and since we had them out might as well put them in the window:
The manufactured 8Square – which we decided to call “Hypnosquare” – is now available on our store. They look quite nice! The lacquered wood case is much nicer than the Ikea shadowboxes that we were using for the kits; I’m going to see if we can’t use the same case for the currently-naked kits too.
These are functionally equivalent to the “basic” kit – they don’t have USB, but do keep the switches on the back for playback control. And just like the retail 4Cube, the UART header and interface are there so if you want to hack it to do your own displays you can.
Lots has happened since the last post, so long ago. Foremost: Chris and I have quit our day jobs to make a go with Hypnocube full time(!) What started as a simple project build on a lark, and morphed into a small after-hours operation, growing organically, is now finally our full time job. We’re now renting an office at the very awesome MakerWorks, which also gives us access to all sorts of neat tools. Living the dream, baby! We’ll see how far we can take it.
Of course there’s lots of work ahead – not least of which is to scale our operations to where it can support us long-term. To that end we’re working on broadening both our product range and our sales outlets. We’ve got a number of new products planned that should be pretty cool, and now that we can devote all of our time to Hypnocube, shouldn’t take years to bring to market (8Cube? What? I have no idea what you’re insinuating, Sir.)
Along those lines, we’ve put a retail version of the 8Square (re-branded HypnoSquare) into production, and have been working on wrapping up the 8Cube to get that particular monkey off our back. More details on both those projects very soon.
Whee.
OK, not quite. We still have the retail 4Cubes in stock, which is the most popular item. But we’re out of all of the kits, and the finished items based on the kits. Chris is in Scotland and I’m in a big crunch finishing a large custom installation piece (more on that later,) so… no kits until both those are resolved in a couple weeks. Everything should be back in stock (including the naked 8Squares) June 23rd or so.
I am swamped right now leading up to a month long bike trip I will be doing in Japan, so I’m suspending Finished 4Cube USB sales (since those require a lot of my time to build) until I get back in May. We’re also temporarily out of 8Square PICs, though that will be rectified much sooner. Retail 4Cubes and 4Cube kits are unaffected and we have those in stock and ready to ship.
Sadly, the frame that we’ve been using for the 8Square has been discontinued by the manufacturer, and we’re about out of stock of them. I’m looking for a suitable replacement, but there really aren’t many small, deep, shadow boxes like that that also aren’t too expensive. So I’m temporarily going to close ordering on the 8Squares, although they’ll be back in some form even if it’s in all it’s naked glory.
We’ve been shamed by one of our customers to finally post a video of the 8square 🙂
I guess being out of stock for the entire month will do that. Who woulda thunk?
I’ve finally got the LEDs in, tested a few, and they’re right this time. So we should be packing up a pile of kits this weekend, and be back in business. To all who have been waiting, thank you for your patience!
We’ve got parts in, ready to be sorted into kits so we can ship out backorders and declare ourselves back in stock. But then I find that the LEDs our supplier sent us have the wrong pinouts. So I’m currently sitting on 10 thousand LEDs I can’t use and trying to get this sorted out with the supplier. Unfortunately this means we won’t be back in stock for probably at least 2 more weeks. Sorry to those waiting, I’ll be contacting those with backorders directly and you can always get a full refund if you don’t want to wait any longer.
