Maker Faire Zürich

Published on 2017-09-11 in PewPew FeatherWing.

We had a maker faire here in Zürich this weekend, and I was showing off some of my projects there. Of course I took the PewPew Lite boards that I had with me, and let everyone play with the prototypes. I also sold all the kits I had assembled, but one, even though I didn’t advertise the fact that I was selling them, and I was very careful to only sell it to people who are genuinely interested in it, and not just getting goaded into buying them by their children. Some observations:

• The fact that it’s not a standalone thing, but that they would need to go and buy something from another shop is a bug turn off.

• People didn’t seem to mind the price as much, even though I was very careful to point it out.

• The fact that you have to assemble it wasn’t bad, it did work well for filtering out the people who just wanted a toy.

• More than tutorials, I need a workshop plan for this. I got at least three tentative offers to run a workshop.

• Everybody much preferred the red PCBs over the yellow ones. I guess the red ones are faster.

I also had four prototypes on my table for people to play with. Some more observations:

• Adults didn’t need instructions on how to play snake. Children did.

• Children tried to control the device by touching the screen. Buttons were something strange to them.

• I really need to add a software restart to the firmware. Switching the device off and on is too cumbersome.

• I need a better source of good power switches. One of them broke.

• The battery really lasts whole day, even though it’s only 100mAh.

• The whole thing is robust enough to survive being dropped, thrown, stepped on, etc. — the only breakage is the one power switch.

• The buttons are a little hard to press for the really small children. But I’m not targeting this to little children, so I’m not sure if I should be panicking over this.

All in all, I’ve very happy with the field testing, though I’m a bit nervous now for problems with the kits that the people have bought. I’m going to work on the documentation now to make it even more clear and to make it easy to start with this.