Missed oppourtunity (or why I never finished my LEGO light controller)

When you work as a consultant, you have to work when there is work. Having a side-project that you can develop during downtime and then later sell is nice. I'm happy with how the RadSense product has developed, but there is one project where I recently missed my opportunity - making better lighting for LEGO and model projects.

I've always been an AFOL and during Covid, I played around with lighting kits. This is great fun, but they all miss important features such as dimming, custom blinking/fading/flashing or RGB colors. It simply does not lokk very convincing when all lights are maximum brightness? And it seems stupid to have a controller that can blink LEDs, but only at preset speeds. I wanted to make something better!

Back in 2020, I mentioned in a blog post that I had purchased the domain http://toytronics.com. The intent was to offer electronics that augmented toys in fun ways. The first product would be a light controller based on ESP32. I made 5 prototypes and laid out extensive plans for the software. It would have 4-8 channels of PWM dimmable LEDs. It would have 1-4 RGB programmable channels. It would use an open protocol. It would be remote controllable via wifi and bluetooth using an app, so anyone could use it. It would have an injection moulded ABS brick to house the electronics, making it very easy to integrate in LEGO builds. This picture shows the first 3 iterations and is taken in April 2021.

Making the product

The amount of work was just massive, but I had set aside $25k for the project. I worked really hard for 3.5 months (mid 2020). At that point I had the hardware working well. The firmware was written in C using ESP IDF. This made it quite maintainable and I got to exercise my FreeRTOS skills. I also worked hard on a cross platform app made with React Native. Both parts worked well. The devices would arrive unconfigured and show up as an Access Point. You could also trigger this by holding a button for 10 seconds. The iOS/Android app would connect to the AP and show a list of AP's so you could easily connect to them. 

You could then use the device from the app to toggle on/off each light. You could also set each channel to a pre-defined effect such as fading and blinking. The device was more or less “feature complete”, but there still was lots to do for it to be a solid product.

At this point, I ran out of time and money. I had made a bet that the project would be approved for a tax refund. Before starting the project, I checked with a bureaucrat at Skattefunn and she said that this was a brilliant project that would surely get a tax refund. Her boyfriend was an AFOL as well, so she totally got it. I then filled out the papers as best as I could, but I did not get the refund. This was later explained to me by a professional consultant specializing in tax returns. He said that the reason was that I had written  what they asked for (describing the whole project). I should instead have only written about the tiny bit that I wanted a refund for.

The lesson learned was that I'll never do this without a consultant. The consultants will take 10-15% of your tax return, but that's well worth it when the alternative is not getting anything at all and thus stranding the project before completion.

Back to consulting

So with no finished product and no money in the bank, it was back to consulting. I've had lots of fun jobs and projects since then, but this was at the top of my TODO list for all of 2021 and 2022. Despite that, I didn't get anywhere. So what happened? When I finally set aside two weeks at a year later, I had a hard time getting the React Native app working. I made it in the end, but I understood that if you bet your business on an App, you will likely spend 2-4 weeks every year just maintaining it and updating required stuff in the App stores. That's a significant investment that either goes from your spare time, in lost consulting income or you have to pay someone.

I also spent $5000 on an injection moulding machine that eventually turned out to simply be a bad design. I basically didn't do my reseach well enough and I also didn't dedicate enough time to it. It's still collecting dust in my office since every time I use it, it gets stuck. The vendor claims some parts were out of spec and sent replacements, but I've come to think it's just a bad design. I should have gone for a proven design rather than trusting what I like on YouTube.

The main problem of the project has been that I'm aiming too high. The hardware and firmware is where my strength is. That I do on a daily basis. Making apps and injection moulding plastic is fun, but it's not something I'm an expert in. I also need to have some spare time for hobbies and family. My vision of making something where anyone could buy a thing and then make it do advanced LED sequencing from an App was simply too lofty and hard to accomplish.

A coffin nail

What I should have done in 2021, was to just start selling the hardware itself. At that point I had made a simplified firmware for both C and C++ that would be a good starting point for tinkerers. Instead, I put the project on the backburner and let it gather dust on my desk. It's surprising how hard it is to shift a project into something simpler? And then - just a couple weeks ago, the great people over at Pimoroni made the same thing: the Tiny FX W.

It's based on an RP2040 with wifi. It has 6 channels for LED effects and one for PWM RGB lights. It also has a STEMMA/QUIIK connector for I2C extensions, an analog port and a 3 watt amplifier. A very nice piece indeed. They've not bothered with making it flat enough to fit a LEGO brick. They've not made fancy firmware. They've not made a fully featured app that makes it accessible to everyone. Instead, they just made a nice DIY board for anyone that want to hack some light and audio effects into their project. So much wiser than my idea…?

So I've not given up on the idea of “ToyTronics”, but I'll likely change the plan somewhat. For now I have enough with my consulting business "MakeTronics" 😊