by john (comments: 0)

They're crazy about cinnamon buns here. That's why Sweden had it classified as traditional food to avoid the EU banning them because the amounts of cinnamon used in the buns here are considered toxic by the EU and thus are banned in the other countries. Denmark forgot to classify it as traditional food and is now facing problems.

They love the buns so much they put them on stamps.

And the stamps are being put on your parcels by me because the posts online label service is still out of function (since 13 days):

They used to have some other cute stamps, but these here are the nicest currently available. And most of them are self adhesive.

Then i made a new batch of 3d Imager multicarts, basically just a cheap multicart with all 3 classic 3D Imager games on it. And all lightpen games except animaction which needs extra ram and is available on the other multicarts.

Animaction is actually a really cool "game" which lets you draw vector animations.

The Vectrex in general has great peripherals.

You'll like the new one to come:-)

by john (comments: 0)

Did I mention I don't like office work?

Well I bet i did;-)

Making the Imagers is actually kind of fun. Even if it took much longer than expected. Getting nice emails from you is fun aswell. Packing them in boxes, quadruplechecking if no mistake was made, putting stamps all over is not that much fun. Good thing now there are 7 more packages on their way to you and I'm eagerly anticipating their arrival. I hope you like them, I'm really happy with the results:-)

(Some stamps are really silly:-))

Tomorrow new stamps arrive and I can pack all the remaining boxes. The online shipping system oficcialy is working again... If there was not that silly bug that prevents me from finalizing the order.

Well one or two days more and everythign is fine again I guess. Things usually solve themselves out here:-)

by john (comments: 0)

Final test for the Imagers before packaging them:

The first Imagers on their way to the post office:

And finally some new vectorzoa slimcarts:

Then my new reflow oven arrived today. I gave it a first spin and realized it's not plug and play, so some more experiments on that soon.

The next day will be used 100% for answering emails, sending out shipping notes and managing orders. Hope to have all emails from the last 30 days answered by tomorrow night.

Feels quite good to have the first packages leaving the house:-)

by john (comments: 0)

Stamps cost ~4 EUR more than printing the address labels, but that shipping option works again since today in contrast to the online version. And I don't want to wait any longer. It's been nearly a week since the first payments arrived.

The local supermarket had ~400EUR in stamps left, so I bought stamps for 300 EUR (so the others can still buy stamps aswell)

I ordered more stamps online (they just had the ~1 EUR stamps left online) so the packages will be covered in stamps. All packages shipping on monday/tuesday will have cinnamon buns, heart shaped flowers and animal babys on them...

by john (comments: 0)

So the status with the post is that the online services I need are still not up yet but the more expensive option to ship from supermarkets is open again.They officially still have 2-3 days delays on those kinds of packages and random false reroutes happen (have to drive 30km now to pick up a parcel for example instead of just 10).

Shipping from the supermarket means that the girl working there will have to type in all your addresses manually in the system. Fast typing is not her strength. Neither her colleagues. Think of one finger on the address label and one searching the right button on the keyboard. I don't want to stand around in the supermarket for 3 hours waiting but I don't feel comfortable with so many paid packages sitting around at my home either. Will have to make up my mind on that later today.

Ok then an update on the vectorzoa games:

Assembly of the pcbs with RAM and bankswitching logic. In that configuration the pcbs have 24k ROM + 8k RAM. Both logo and spikes circus need that much RAM.

One thing I realised is that I could significantly cut down assembly time by using solder paste stencils and a reflow oven. Reflow oven is already ordered (chinese version of course, homebrew style) and should arrive any day now. With the stencils I gonna wait till I have some spare money. Now I'm using a glue dispenseer hacked for use with solder paste, a hot iron and a SMD hot air rework station. It works. Results look much better than with a soldering iron.

cleaning the pcbs with ultrasonic in isopropyl alcohol. Gonna buy a better cleaner now, ultrasonic cleaners for 100EUR and below are just toys when you want it clean fast without manual brushing needed:

The first paint layer for logolite:

The green layer on top. The challenge here was to fing a paint that sticks on the chrome paint without dissolving it and yet is not opaque. Of course I forgot which of the 40 Spraycans I have I used back then and had to experiment a little. But I think I got it figured out, the green gets a bit darker when drying:

Note to myself: only buy paint from 1-2brands from now on. I already bought 3 new paints for Spikes Circus, since the one I bought back than is about to be empty soon. Since Spikes Circus was orange themed I chose neon orange on black background which makes it appear not neon colored at all but gives it a surface with really nice haptic properties. Since juggling while riding a unicycle is a lot about fine feeling, the special haptic slimcart design was a must:-)

Well the paint is wet in the pictures, so will see later today how it looks dried. later today I will apply the decals with the resin.

The question of the day is: how do I remove the orange Spikes Circusesque coating from my only pair of fine shoes o_O.

by john (comments: 0)

No the swedish post computer system still is not working.

And the printer I used to print the golden/silver decals for the vectorzoa slimcart games was broken aswell, when I decided to print more for the new batch. Since these printers don't get made anymore since the year 2000 and they cost 500+ EUR on ebay buying a new one definitely is no option for me so I decided to fix it. Just took ~4 hours and epoxy-glue and it seems to work again (I won't put it back in the plastic casing again though, this allows faster fixing in the future.

Since Epoxy systems are quite toxic, I store them outside, so it took some time till I found the resin again to perform some tests. Just in case I ordered new anyways.

The ICs for the bankswitching logic arrive on Tuesday (if UPS doesn't screw up again, they're notorious for being unreliable in what parcel services call "remote areas" (=where I live). So it looks like vectorzoas games will be back in Stock from Wednesday on - yaaay

by john (comments: 0)

Ok so the last 3 days I've been answering mails nonstop. I nearly managed to answer all mails and had some really good and motivating conversations with some of you. That was good because If there's one job I really don't like then it's bookkeeping. So having done that for three days it was time for something else so I decided to pack all orders that have been paid for in the last 2 days and print out the shipping labels so I could ship today (Friday).

Going on the swedish post website (posten.se) I see a note that there was a fire in their datacenter and the whole postal website and tracking system is temporarily down. So no way for me to post your imagers today.

Machine translated news articles:
article 1
article 2

This will delay shipping your item(s) till the post services (posten.se) are up and running again. I work the whole weekend, so if the services are up again by Sunday, your item(s) will ship on Monday.

Here two short pictures, the first showing the wheels being printed with the old technique:

And the second one showing the wheels before being spraypainted. The printers cannot the black colour opaque, so I have to cover them in three layers of black spraypaint:

The rest is going really well, the vectorzoa games should be in stock within 2 weeks, the postwoman brought me new ink and shipping boxes today and more motors for imagers are ariving any day from now.

I hope to find some time next week to finally work a bit on the website:-)

by john (comments: 0)

Finally.

The first 44 imagers are sitting here waiting to be shipped. I'm now answering all order emails I got which may take a day or two. It turned out making them takes far longer time than I thought so I definitely cannot keep the price at 79 EUR which basically is the old price from 7 years ago.

As a thank you all of you who preordered and everyone ordering till end of January will get the imager for the old price of 79 EUR. From February 2014 on the price will be 99 EUR. This is mostly due to the time it takes to make them, but also due to 55% income tax rate here.

With having enough imagers on hand to satisfy all preorders I expect to have enough lightpens in 7 days and vectorzoa slimcart games in latest 14 days.

Thanks for your interest!

by john (comments: 0)

Happy holidays everyone!

For many of us this is the time of the year we got our first Vectrex, had unlimited time playing video games. I've had two wonderfully creative and extremely (!) chaotic Vectrex games related weeks and will pack and invoice the first 30 imagers before this weekend. YAY:-)

Stay tuned.

by john (comments: 0)

I've been focusing on the most important stuff: getting the stuff produced. So no CSS, no description updates for today. Tomorrow though:-)

It's been a long week, the first Imagers will be ready to be shipped around Tuesday and 50 Imagers will be done by next Friday.

Not much more text now, just two pictures of soon-to-be-3d-imagers and my workbench: