Well, the RS232 Rate Converter is pretty mature now. It does it’s job well and there is not a lot of improvements to make to it anymore. So what to do next?

I’ve been talking with a friend in the home automation business and he reckons there’d be a small market for an RS232 controllable volume control. This device would allow a home automation processor to control the volume on an amplifier which does not have any other means of remote control.

Now I thought that would be a pretty simple thing for me to make so I built a prototype. It only took me three evenings to cobble together something that works, thanks mainly to RS Components‘ free next-day shipping for electronic parts. I think this will be my next product.

Of course I can’t sell it in this state, it’s funny but taking a product from prototype to production is usually more work than making the prototype in the first place.

Hmm, this blog seems to be getting a lot of comment spam. I’m going to try the NoSpamNX plugin and see if that helps.

This is a bug fix release based on some user feedback I got. There are a whole bunch of little fixes including some problems with audio sync when playing videos and an issue with the seek bar if your media file was longer than 40 minutes.

There is no public bug-tracker for this software (yet) so if you try it out and find any more bugs, please email me at adam@siliconsparrow.com and I’ll fix them as soon as I can.

The new version is online now and ready to download at http://supertranscribe.com.

Since I changed my other sites, I may as well complete the trilogy. Ka-Ching Pal now has the same snazzy look as my other Silicon Sparrow branded sites.

I liked the new Super Transcribe site that Bea designed for me so much, I copied the design to Serial Gadget too! It has the Silicon Sparrow logo at the top and a more prominent BUY button. The colour scheme is much improved and it ties in well with my current branding exercise.

It looks like a proper professional product now. Why not go and have a look at http://serialgadget.com/.

Bea did a neat new design for me. This is a lot better than the previous design.

I like the more prominent DOWNLOAD and BUY buttons, plus the news items are better separated from the main text. The Silicon Sparrow logo has been included in a big way which continues on the theme of drawing all my products under the one brand. It is looking good.

You can visit the site at http://supertranscribe.com/.

I was setting up some eCommerce websites recently, maybe it was a combination of not enough sleep and too much coffee but I thought to myself, I wish that whenever I got a payment through PayPal, my PC would make a Ka-ching! noise.

So then I spent a couple of hours making a Windows Tray App to do just that.

Then I thought maybe other people might like this too.

So I spent an additional two days setting up a website and polishing the app, making an installer and sorting out all the other little details that are needed to make it usable by non-nerds.

So here we have my new product called Ka-Ching Pal. The website is up and taking orders at http://kachingpal.com/.

I’ve just built the first of my new revision 3 RS232 Bit Rate Converter. It has the following improvements:

• Cleaner, more stable RS232 output signal
• Can accept a range of power supply voltages from 5V up to 12V
• Has a professionally designed and printed vinyl label instead of the rather amateurish ones I was making myself

The design is mature now. I am impressed by the device’s reliability. I’ve been selling these things for almost a year now and haven’t had a single unit fail.

I’ve also put the Silicon Sparrow logo on the label. I’m going to do that to all my products from now on to try and gather them into a common brand.

Why not pop over to http://serialgadget.com/ to read more about this device or even buy one!

I’m looking for a little bit of freelance work at the moment, if you are interested in someone to help you out with digital circuit design, embedded systems design or programming, application development or even web sites or server back end work, drop me a line at adam@siliconsparrow.com. I’ve put my Resumé online for you to download if you are interested.

Would you pay $98 for this ?

Being in the electronics design business, I am often ordering parts in small quantities and the best place to do that is Digi-Key. But it really annoys me that Digi-key can’t sort by price. When I’m looking for, say, a 470µF capacitor, it gives me 100 different ones to choose from, of course I just want to order the cheapest one but I end up having to read through a dozen pages to find it. Now I can use Alex Leone’s neato DigiKey Sort By Price FireFox plugin. Thanks Alex, that’s a real useful tool!