Week of November 29th – Prototype

This week I got to observe Doug work on the housing for a product which has been “on the drawing board” for a couple of years. It is essentially the Preset10-A, but it uses capacitive touch and allows you to define each button as either a group, attribute, fixture or preset. It also makes it so you don’t need to bring an external source of DMX to set it up, and you can change the looks, too. It’s now the end of the week, and I can tell that this particular development puzzle won’t be finished quickly. Doug has already gone through three different iterations of the housing.

Doug has been trying to decide how to make this product, the Chameleon, look professional, but still function reliably. He has found that the capacitive touch abilities aren’t nearly reliable enough for the company’s standards, and has had to re-do much of his work over the years. I found that, while I was theoretically helping him design the housing, I mostly functioned as a sounding board for his musings, and offered only topical insight into the product’s development.

I’ve gotten a lot of “we tried that already, didn’t work”, “it works, but sometimes it starts acting weird”, I guess that’s the difference between theoretical knowledge and actually trying it in person, in a real environment.