The Next Step

An ending and a beginning

The 3D modeling for the Patternflow enclosure is finally in sight of done. When the newly made PCB and parts I ordered arrive I'll have to test again, but I have a feeling it'll be fine. To spread word of the pre-launch, I wrote the project up for a few subreddits and Hackaday. That's enough promoting-by-writing for now, and I want to get back to focusing on Instagram content. I'm thinking about two directions. Let me unpack each part.

3D printing was really hard. Why? Honestly, for a simple open-source project, the first model I made a few months ago is enough. Because I'm going for global funding, I had to push the product quality up, and I got it into my head that I should print it in one piece on a big printer (something like the H2S). That process was rougher than expected, and the things I'd fixed and expected to come out right came back as disappointment, just like that. As that repeated, the fatigue piled up and the fun drained out. The constant waiting was one of the things that wore me down, too. With the P1S I can print and test right there in the club room, but the H2S is only at the school makerspace, so I used it through the professor. Revise, send it to him, message again to confirm it printed, go see the failed result, revise again, message again. Sometimes he's busy and I wait whole days, and these stretches full of uncertainty were hard on me. I find ambiguity hard to bear. Personally I prefer a fast failure to an uncertain wait. Because during that wait I can't rest easy.

Still, the latest print came out good enough to call a success. Sure, there's plenty that could be improved, but I don't need to cling to it the way I did before. Looking back now, I don't know why I clung so desperately, so fast. Did I think I had to rush a prototype to Crowd Supply? Or that the community was waiting? More than that, I think it was just that revising and revising and revising again turned into stubbornness. I really didn't need to revise this much. They were problems I could easily have seen coming. Too many of them were too trivial to call something I "learned" this time around. In the end, I just hadn't paid proper attention. Running on stubbornness, I'd been trying to knock it out roughly. Ah, if you're curious about the process, you can look at Issue #113.

For the new PCB, I added a USB-C adapter, and that's giving me something to chew on. I added it for product quality, but because of it, an inconvenience arises for the open-source side. It isn't a common part, so ordering it takes a fair while. So I wonder if, for the open-source community version, I should keep the existing 2-pin screw terminal. But then the enclosure naturally splits in two? How do I even manage that, and the documentation gets more complicated too. I don't know. The PCB issue is here: Issue #114.

To promote it I posted to several subreddits. Three, counting Arduino? Arduino, FastLED, creative coding, yeah, three. The Arduino one got removed. Cut because my homepage has a link out to the Crowd Supply pre-launch page. It stung, a fair bit. By that logic, an open-source project that's grown a bit can't post there. Well, nothing to be done. I don't need to stay tied to it either. If anything, somewhere else might suit Patternflow better. People responded well, so it was nice. Crowd Supply subscriptions climbed too, now at 60. Past a third. Long way to go. The GitHub stars hit 171, and at this rate it looks like they'll cross 200 soon. It seems like the pieces others wrote, not just my own Reddit posts, are what really help. The posts on other platforms actually bring in more traffic.

Moving from Crowd Supply's pre-launch stage to launch is harder than I expected. With over 100 people already on the waitlist I thought I'd fill it fast, but conversion is stuck at 20% and climbs slowly. I'd heard the success rate at launch is higher than other platforms, and structurally, it can't be otherwise. Talking with Crowd Supply's pre-launch manager, I also got the sense that they don't really pay pre-launch much mind. Seeing a lot of very old pre-launch projects still sitting on the site, I'd wondered about it, and now it makes a kind of sense. Still, my advantage over others is that I have my own platform, Instagram. I can keep churning out content, so that part's no trouble. Hm. I do regret choosing Crowd Supply a little. I can't shake the feeling that Patternflow isn't all that deep, that it actually suits Kickstarter much better, and that Kickstarter has far more name recognition for other people too. That said, thinking about fulfillment and all the post-launch stuff, Crowd Supply is the right call after all. If it's your first time doing this, better to be managed through it, and I'm not a team. Looking back, I don't know. I'm just anxious, worried about whether I can even fill the pre-launch. I wanted to fill it as fast as possible, and it isn't going the way I pictured.

To fill the remaining hundred or so, nothing comes to mind besides making Instagram content. Collaborating with other influencers or artists is good too, of course, but it doesn't fit my temperament. If the other side brings it to me first, I'll say yes to all of it, but I hate bearing the uncertainty of proposing first and having them refuse, or having things change. So once again I'm trying to do it alone. Well, I don't mind. There's a part of it that looks fun. For one, having the Instagram channel already makes it the ideal setting. And I can experiment with it like research. Using the pilot reels feature to make content of a single pattern manipulated in various ways, I'll be able to learn what kinds of pattern changes people like. It isn't easy, of course. It's the study of patterns itself. But if I keep at it, won't my own sense of it get a lot sharper? And if I can organize it into something theoretical, wouldn't that be a pretty decent piece of research?

Sound, too, I have to do now. I kept saying I want to, I want to, and only said it, but now I really have to. This is a new road I haven't walked yet, and it looks like there's a lot to gain. I'm interested, and it's a place others are interested in too. Maybe it has the highest potential of all. I'll do it. Yeah. Fix: Ah, I don't want to write anymore. I'm back at my parents' place resting for once, so I'll just leave it roughly here and wrap up. Good work, me.