Hiemal
0
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2011
- Messages
- 1,443
- Points
- 63
Hey, hey. I know I haven't posted anything here for a while, and I apologize for not letting anyone know what's going on.
To begin;
The Elasti-drive was supposed to be an easy replacement for the flexdrive while maintaining a good price point, and reliability.
However I've found that ... just, given the circumstances under which I make them, I cannot make them reliably enough (in large quantities) to merit continuing to sell them.
Most of the time it's just because I cannot get the main IC chip to solder on correctly, and thus the entire board goes bad because I can't fix it, and a good chunk of money is just lost because of it.
Another problem is that I also wanted it to be able to be used with one or two cells, and not have the current change; For whatever reason the current sense op amp registers the additional voltage as a reason to increase current thus causing major issues for those who wanted to switch back and forth between one cell or two cells. I could never figure out the problem with that and it was extremely frustrating for both me and Tom.
Not to mention that Tom never really got back much from the entire process either; I feel so bad because the project kind of fell flat on its face after school kicked in for me, and the frustration of not having several drivers not work and the money, and the time required to make even a small batch just started to become too much for me.
Thus I kind of gave up on it, because of the number of problems that came about trying to make these easily accessible, while also giving myself a small profit when I was at school.
As for where this heads, I don't know. I'll email Tom and just ask him if I can release the project files as open source so you guys can fool around with it and maybe try making them yourselves, and maybe fixing the problems that were presented to me that I couldn't solve on my own.
To begin;
The Elasti-drive was supposed to be an easy replacement for the flexdrive while maintaining a good price point, and reliability.
However I've found that ... just, given the circumstances under which I make them, I cannot make them reliably enough (in large quantities) to merit continuing to sell them.
Most of the time it's just because I cannot get the main IC chip to solder on correctly, and thus the entire board goes bad because I can't fix it, and a good chunk of money is just lost because of it.
Another problem is that I also wanted it to be able to be used with one or two cells, and not have the current change; For whatever reason the current sense op amp registers the additional voltage as a reason to increase current thus causing major issues for those who wanted to switch back and forth between one cell or two cells. I could never figure out the problem with that and it was extremely frustrating for both me and Tom.
Not to mention that Tom never really got back much from the entire process either; I feel so bad because the project kind of fell flat on its face after school kicked in for me, and the frustration of not having several drivers not work and the money, and the time required to make even a small batch just started to become too much for me.
Thus I kind of gave up on it, because of the number of problems that came about trying to make these easily accessible, while also giving myself a small profit when I was at school.
As for where this heads, I don't know. I'll email Tom and just ask him if I can release the project files as open source so you guys can fool around with it and maybe try making them yourselves, and maybe fixing the problems that were presented to me that I couldn't solve on my own.
