Haha, no worries, it just seemed like a who’s who of retired enterprise machines!

Do you work in enterprise IT?

I mean if you’ll look after my kids for a couple of weeks I’m right with you.

Linux, the answer is obviously Linux.

Am I going clockwise or anticlockwise round the track?

It’s getting so convoluted at this point just knowing clockwise/anticlockwise is infinitely easier.

It doesn’t even bloody work, lefty tighty righty loosy is every bit as valid if the spanner is at the bottom.

If it had an accelerometer and Bluetooth I’d have it already.

Fair enough, what’s software/hardware support like in general?

I’d imagine chip design is sufficiently complex that you could both be competent and not have a fucking clue what’s causing this. A recall is bound to be cheaper than the impact this is going to have on customer trust. Not only are they the lower performance chips, they’re buggy lower performance chips.

Why openBSD though?

MS make a decent mouse as it goes.

swindled?

And it’s cloning NT

Haha, I’m in an awkward place with FreeCAD, I love it for what it is, but I’m definitely not saying it’s without its shortcomings. The latest dev build seemingly has some great QoL upgrades for the sketcher. The topo naming issue is an absolute pain and the various assembly workbenches can be excruciating to work with at times. Everything takes longer than bigger CAD packages too.

I can normally get there in the end though. The principals are the same, sketch/pad/pocket/fillet etc. there are definite issues with the underlying CAD kernel as well, fillets are just batshit sometimes (like, it won’t round an edge, let’s you round an exact mirror of the edge on the other side of the model, you close the program and open it again and now you can round the edge).

Honestly, I think they can get there - probably more direction in the project would get it further and more paid devs working on core components would help (for instance there’s a guitar design workbench but no midpoint constraint in sketcher, but it’s open source and someone wanted to build a guitar design workbench and that’s that) I suspect they don’t get anything like the funding Blender does (160k+ pcm) which is probably needed for a number of years to get it where it needs to be.

I think FreeCAD is still the best bet, it does.seem to be making a few strides recently. Topo naming and sketcher workbench are both getting updates. For me personally it’s definitely usable for personal projects. I want better FreeCAD rather than an alternative new thing.

Thanks, really appreciate the feedback! Really good luck with the project, love seeing these kind of devices making it into the wild. Yeah totally appreciate the nature of indie electronics/manufacturing in general and your work totally makes it easier and more approachable for a lone wolf like myself to churn out something functional!

Thanks for heads up on the BT audio, my little investigation the other night lead me to the datasheet for the ESP32-S3, the list of peripheral options is amazing, I’m sure I’ll figure something out!

Thanks again and good luck with the project!

Yeah, I took a bit of a poke last night, there’s a couple of ICs in there that could add up a bit I guess, but even being generous I wasn’t getting much last 80.

The cases I saw had the look of a 3D print about them. Original goal seems to have been around 10000, so maybe they’re amortizing the r&d across 40 units, little bit of profit and then went and sold 400 of them - nice win for them if so!

To make it clear I don’t begrudge them their profit especially as they’re open sourcing the thing. The concept and high price has got my creative side going for sure, an ESP32-S3 pro dev board looks like it could handle an sd card, screen, MP3 decode and output to an I2S amp all by itself + BT headphones and WiFi track downloading and battery charging. Slowly talking myself into building a portable podcast machine.

I’m genuinely curious if someone’s published a BoM cost breakdown, I’m wondering if there’s a couple of super high tickets items in the like the scroll wheel and custom PCB cost.

Literally every CAD program suffers this to a greater or lesser degree. There are workarounds but they’re clunky.