After looking at my sales figures, it seems the majority of my RS232 Rate Converter sales are going to America. I’ve only sold two into Australia ever, so it seems to me that pricing it in Australian dollars is not appropriate for this product, especially since the Australian dollar has been moving quite a lot in relation to the greenback in recent weeks.
The new price is US$ 89.00.
It’s taken me a little while to fit this in around my freelance work and family obligations but finally I have put out a version 1.0 of Super Transcribe. This is transcription software for Windows. It allows you to load up a media file (most common formats supported) and slow down the replay so you can keep up without having to be the world’s fastest typist. It can slow down the replay up to 5 times without changing the pitch of the speech. It’s just perfect for transcribing podcasts.
It also has a lot of handy-dandy features like keeping track of multiple participants in a dialogue and lots of shortcut keys so you don’t have to take your hands off the keyboard much, and it has a beautiful new look & feel thanks to Bea. Why not go along to http://supertranscribe.com/ and download the demo. Tell me what you think of it.
One of my peeves about the electronics business is the poor availability of parts. I’d found this brilliant AP1115 power regulator from Diodes Inc. which I’ve been using for months in my RS232 Rate Converter but now, you can’t get them anymore. I haven’t found a supplier who stocks this part since June and my own stock has run out.
Fortunately, I have found the MCP1703 from Microchip which is compatible and will do as a substitute. But now I can’t get the particular Atmel microprocessor I use, well not in small quantities anyway and I am not ready to order 1000 of them based on the sales I’m getting at the moment. So I’ve had to go up a model and get a more expensive microcontroller which is pin-compatible but I’ll have to change the firmware to make it work. This is the third time I’ve had to tweak the design of this product due to unavailable parts in the last 12 months. Such is the fun of the electronics biz!
I finally think the Super Transcribe software is good enough to inflict on the public. So I have put up the first beta release. It is still a little rough around the edges but it is certainly usable and even useful. Go to http://supertranscribe.com/ to download it and try it out.
I had a bit of a surprise when looking at the traffic logs for the new Super Transcribe website. The site has been online for a few months but until now, it only showed a blank home page. I had not announced it or promoted it in any way.
I noticed that some web crawler had not only found the site but found my source code repository and people have been downloading the source to this app before it has even been released! I’m going to have to put up some security on that!
I’m about to start a beta release of my newest project. It is a transcription application for Windows called Super Transcribe.
I’ve been working on this for a few months now on and off in my spare time. The website supertranscribe.com is up and I’ll have the beta release on the site real soon now.
Looking at the RS232 Bit Rate Converter website, I thought it needed more documentation so potential customers can find out more about the product before committing to buy one.
So I now have an FAQ and I added more details to the user manual, more than doubling it’s length. The user manual is now available in PDF format and also HTML for reading online.
I was also considering setting up a blog on the Serial Gadget website but I found a neater solution. By using a PHP RSS reader, I can automatically find any articles I write on Silicon Sparrow blog (such as this one) which are relevant to the Serial Gadget website and summarize them on a “News” page on serialgadget.com. That’s one less blog I need to manage.
Having a News page is also good for customers as they can see that the site is still being updated and is not one of the many zombie dead abandoned sites which abound on the global internet.
Boards boards boards!
I’ve been working on a few things to improve the RS232 Bit Rate Converter. Here’s my new revision 3 circuit board.
There are some extra capacitors to smooth out a little noise I was getting in the serial data stream and I have also outsourced the machining of the end panels.
The changes are to eliminate some pain for me since I am still hand-assembling these things. I’d love to get the volume up so I could outsource the whole manufacturing process but for a niche product like this, who knows if the volume will ever become that great.
I got a new batch of boards pressed with the additional capacitors included in the layout. I have been patching them onto the revision 2 board but it is a fiddly operation, much nicer to have it baked into the design.
I have also found a more efficient power regulator which can accept an input of up to 15V. This is in response to a very common user request for the device to run off 12V. It seems a lot of people have been using them in the automotive sphere.
Now my biggest problem is lead time on parts, I still have two weeks to wait for some chips I ordered a month ago and my stock is running low.
I’m official. I just received my business name registration in the post. Silicon Sparrow is now a registered business in New South Wales, ABN number 83-841-478-358. Now all I need is some more products and more customers…
By the way, do you like my new little bird logo at the top there, it was designed by my wife Bea who is pretty good at that kind of thing.
To test some equipment which was controlled by the printer port on my PC, I wrote a simple test app. This is allows you to control the state of the data bits and control bits and also see the state of the status bits. It’s not very pretty and only does SPP port functions because that is all I needed for the job at hand. I wrote it in Python because I was looking for an excuse to learn wxPython.
Adam's Parallel Port Monitor
Now I am putting it on this blog so anyone else who finds it useful can have it.
To run this, you will need Python obviously, you will also need wxPython and also a DLL called inpout32.dll to allow port access under Windows.
Oh, and it only works in Windows. Sorry.
