Slow winter coming up?

Ever since I quit the firm I started in 1996, I've had a steady influx of new jobs. Since 2008, I've more or less known what I'll be doing the coming 3-6 months. This winter, it seems a little different?

The press have discussed the general downturn happening in Norway this year. The Norwegian monetary unit (Kroner) is performing badly against Euros and Dollars. Blame is being put on everything from interest rates to unfair taxes, but there's no decisive conclusion on the cause. What is obvious is that everyone is saving up for rough times and that people in general are spending less. I hear from friends & owners in restaurant & bars that they've lost 30-50% of the business, so they're all scaling down as much as possible. Customers are less willing to do the R'n'D projects that consultants (like me) make a living from. Exciting companies like Novelda go bankrupt and there's more firms folding than it's been in a long time. I'd say it's interesting times and it's not down to AI taking over jobs (just yet).

New projects welcome

While I don't have those long projects any more, I actually have more customers when counting. The projects are just smaller and go over a shorter timeframe. I still do work on large customer projects, but it's less new products & innovation and more just wrapping up existing projects. I hear the same from friends in the tech sector as well. Up until now I've worked full weeks, but I just don't have those large projects lined up, so for anyone reading this: I'm available and accepting new customers 😉

I actually recently got two new US customers, so I guess hiring engineers from Norway is currently cheap thanks to the Norwegian Kroner being weak? Fun projects both of them - based on my experience designing custom boards around the Teensy 4.1. They both found me via my Github page where I have published a free to use T4.1 design in Kicad. My board help others making custom boards for the brilliant Teensy platform created by Paul from PJRC.

More time for my own products

Less time spent on client work, means more time to spend on my own projects and I'm learning a lot these days. I first blogged about developing my own products back in March, but I've learned so much since then. I plan to make a presentation that I'll pitch to conferences about how you spend your time when making products. As a maker, you always think that it's “making the thing” that is the hard part. It really is not. I think the time spent on the hardware/firmware for RadSense is now less than 10% of the total time spent on the product?

What is hard is all the things you have to do, that you're not good at or have never done before. It's all the things that eventually make your customers buy the product. I'm setting up demos and write about the results in the Maketronics Blog. I regularly publish good Use Cases and new tutorials. I have a list of examples I want to make. I'm researching better ways to sell than using Amazon. I'm looking for new markets where a radar sensor can be useful and I'm documenting the capabilities of the device better than before.

It's a slow process since I'm new to it, but I can see it's working. It also requires that I plan my days differently. My workday has typically been “Make this PCB”, “implement this chip on our board”, “Solve this firmware/hardware problem”. or “work through the open issues on git”. These are all tasks that take hours and they're often more than a day of work. These days, it's rather a series of small tasks and I need to change how I set my day up. The more work I put into my own products, the more the variety of the tasks. Packaging, marketing, sales, documentation, tutorials, customs, support… Lot's of things I would normally leave to others, but when it's your own product you have to do it all yourself.

Working on new products

I'm working on several new products. One is a product to measure waves, temperature and currents over long periods of time. Battery saving is crucial and I'm learning a lot about making very low power electronics. I also do a project on power saving + solar for the Phone Booth project, so my Joulescope is seeing a lot of use. Both projects require a lot of real world testing and these are slow processes that just take time. The wave sensor needs to be deployed underwater for each test, so it requires access to the ocean and a boat. I also read up on things I need to make sense of the data it's gathering (salinity/temperature/tides & more) so there are many new things to learn for the wave sensor alone. I also test it in the pressure chamber we have at Bitraf.

Speaking of Bitraf - we now have more than 400 paying members and we still don't have any funding other than memberships. Just after summer I handed the economy for Bitraf over to someone else. This has freed up time that I'm now using to finish up Bitraf projects as well as making new workshops and courses.