Monthly Archives: June 2018
Kickstarter – Rebooted
It’s taken a couple of years since my last successful Kickstarter to find another Kickstarter worthy idea.
I learned a lot about how the kickstarter marketing funnel works with
I also put up a “quick and dirty” support site at
http://rocketblueautomation.com/
Now, 2 years later, we are doing a second production run of the Pi Platter because it continues to sell consistently, and we have a few regular customers.
Mind you, the Pi Platter was never intended to be a “home run,” but rather just a base hit so I could fully appreciate how crowd funding works. Indeed, I learned a lot that will help me on this next “reboot.”
As of this writing, I am still refining the target market. What is clear is that there is a market for a nice case, with a nice user interface and associated code.
One of the things that made the last Kickstarter successful was we had some good examples about how to use our offering – namely the Pi Platter.
For most makers, a polished physical packaging is an afterthought – and often never gets done. This has certainly been the case for me. The user interface consists of a 64×64 oLED display and a rotary encoder with a built in push button switch. So far, I wrote out micropython script to make a temperature/humidity alarm with adjustable set point. The real time interrupts of the rotary encoder where a bit tricky and not surprisingly, micropython was a bit slow on an ESP32. I was curious how well micropython worked, but now that I’ve seen the result, I will redo the code in C. The case is large enough for any number of ESP32, ESP8266 and Arduino boards, including a LiPo battery and charge controller or boost converter. Even a Raspberry Pi Zero will fit.
A couple of candidate niches to sell my new case/UI design to small farm/homestead and the biohackers. I will likely create more than one Kickstarter to cover all the possibilities.