What's up with me these days.

I have so many moments where  I think, "that would be a great blog post". The end result is what you see on Bytecruft, not so many posts. I really enjoy writing a blog, though somehow it always ends up close to last in priorities.

My business, Anibit Technology is doing OK. Not great, but not exactly where I had hoped. The hardware business is hard, really, really hard. Re-selling other's hardware is even harder. I love being part of the "Maker" movement, however marginal. I wanted to make it something that I could do full time by diving head-first into it, and supporting myself and family by doing something that I love. That's the ultimate American dream, right?

My plan was, and more of less is, still something like this:

1. Design and produce hardware with accompanying software that will help people who like to invent, or who want to lean to invent.
2. ???
3. Profit.

Alright, that's a little facetious, but not as far from the gist of it that my characterization doesn't make me a little self-conscious.

Taxes

I feel like a kid who waited until the last minute to do that book report for school, and realized he should have actually read the book.

US Income tax filings are due on April 15th for the prior year. My income for Anibit sales is not organized in a way the makes it easy to come up with a net taxable income, so I have to manually pour over all sales for last year to come up with the proper figures. The worst part of it is that while I have the cost basis (ie, the part of gross sales that were not profit) data, I don't have an easy way to collate it, so I'm going to have to wear out the numpad on my computer with a bunch of spreadsheets. All of this will actually amount to a very small amount for Uncle Sam. Anibit's sales last year were nothing to write home about (more on that in a future post).  I just really need to avoid overpaying what I owe, which is what would happen if I don't comb through all the sales.

This could possible be avoided if my Anibit's software had a little more in the way of reporting tools, but I understand it's a very hard thing to do since you can't really make a blanket formula for how tax accounting should work.

Project Box explorer

I've adapted my "Automated CAD design" system to go a few steps further and have it generate all the data and metadata needed for an interactive website that lets you explore a canned(for now) set of design permutations.

I've got a lot of polish to do on the html itself, but I finally got it to a minimally viable web app.

Check it out: https://anibit.com/box

Stupid Simple Website Metrics

I wrote a tool that I am open-sourcing to keep track of website server performance. It is very un-fancy. It tries to do one job and do it well: Log and display page load times. (Wait, is that two jobs?)

Background

Over the past several months, I've spent way more time than I had anticipated stressing over, testing, and trying to fix the abdominal performance I had on anibit.com. I was using a low end hosting service intended for personal websites, which I had expected to on the slower side of things, but it got so bad that page loads could take up to 45 seconds. That was even at times when I was the only user other than the failed spam-bot log ins once a minute or so. I would have been satisfied with 6 second loads even though that is considered a generally poor user experience. Something had to give. Anibit was on a shared server with probably dozens (my host service doesn't reveal that I'm aware of how many websites share your host). Any of them could misbehave and bring the server to it's knees until the hosting service brought the hammer down on them, which it frequently needed to do.

Followup to my "Automated CAD Design" post.

I received a lot of positive feedback on my last post, and some of the ideas posted on the sites that picked it up gave me the inspiration to write this follow up. There were some good ideas and some questions posed so I thought I'd try to make  few addenda and clarifications.

Choice of toolchain.

I chose OpenSCAD mostly as the first thing that popped into my head. The nightly version (2014.03 as I write), is fairly stable. The output it generated was well received by most of the other tools I used it with, which included Blender3D, for rendering the preview images, MeshLab for debugging the geometry when I goofed something, and LibreCAD for loading the 2D DXF files to send to my laser cutter. I even used Elmer to do some rudimentary(and probably naive) stress sanity checks.

I did lament that some the really cool features in the bleeding edge version of OpenSCAD were not available, but the generated output of the newer version had some erroneous geometry. I've read on the OpenSCAD forums there may be some versions for download that don't have those bugs.

I had worked with OpenSCAD before, so I knew what it's capabilities and limitations were. I wasn't really tied to OpenSCAD, here are some alternative tools work very similarly. Ultimately, it came down to the devil I knew, and that it supported all of the features that were critical to me: easy to setup, mature and stable, bug free STL and DXF output, and allowing me to programmatically override the skeleton designs by emitting generated design code.

Automated CAD design.

[UPDATE: I've written a followup  here]

First, I should get something off my chest, the title is probably a little misleading. "Heavily parameterized 3D case design" might have been a more accurate, but dull title.

I recently kicked off laser cutting services on Anibit, and I plan to augment that service with a lot of specific product designs that I create. I'm a nut for automation and flexibility, and I'm deficient in intrinsic artistic talent. I determined that, as much as possible, I would design the physical aspects of my mechatronics creations in a way that I could easily make changes large and small, and not have to re-do much work.

My first area of focus was an automated heavily parameterized system of scripts for creating laser cut acrylic project cases. This was stupid fun to work on, and my blog post frequency has been anemic this year, so grab some snacks and settle in for a read.

Automatically rendered preview image.

My weapon of choice in this case is OpenSCAD, a text-based parametric modeling program. Don't be intimidated, OpenSCAD is one of the easiest modeling packages I've ever used. Software developers especially will feel right at home:

Updates.

Whew. I've been spending alot of time on my "Sister site". I thought I would have had more time to blog about Fun Stuff^TM by now. There is so much work behind the scenes that you need to do to launch a site like I want to do. I enjoy it, the supporting work, but it's all still more of the means to an end, I'm enjoying the journey, but I'm looking forward to the destination.

I have to say one stark lesson I've already learned is "Just because you've built it, doesn't mean they'll come". I have very little traffic to my site, and website traffic generation ranks substantially below marketing in requisite business development activities as far as my interests go. I know there are thousands or tens of thousands of people out there that would be interested in the site, but how do I connect with them? Part of building a catalog of existing parts was to attract a regular audience/demographic interested in hobby electronics. That, and other content I have planned (in the next phase, starting soon) would make Anibit bookmark/Feedly-subscription-worthy site.

But I get the feeling, given metrics to date, that there's more needed that just throwing content up and hoping for people to find it. Yet, I don't know what that thing is. My traffic to Anibit so far is dismal, especially if you cull the traffic generated by my personal Social Networking friends(lot of my hits cluster in places I or my family have lived). I supposed I should keep it in perspective (starting a business requires a healthy does of that). Self-bootstrapping with cash on hand like I am doing requires a lot of patience, and the experiences I've had while doing it so far have almost all been rewarding and overwhelmingly positive.

--P