I looked at the time and realised the afternoon had flown by, my other half would be home soon. I was just about to get up and put the kettle on when I spotted she was still in work. How did I know? It was obvious from my WhereDial. I started to worry that we'd be eating late but the dial started moving and came to rest on "Travelling". Not such a late one after all. I'd learnt the pattern a long while ago. It would tick round to "Station", back to "Travelling" and then once it hit "Station" again it was time to put the kettle on as she'd be through the door shortly after.
This might sound like an odd story if you've never come across the WhereDial but a story similar to this has been playing out regularly in my house since I came up with the idea for the WhereDial. The original concept came about when I was working to promote my MapMe.At site and attended an Arduino hack day - Howduino - in Liverpool. I couldn't think of anything to make and someone suggested I make a location clock "like in the Harry Potter books". During the event I managed to get something basic working and did eventually get a functioning clock working that would connect to MapMe.at, find out my location and update it's hands to show where I was. I blogged about the clock and pictures of it have shown up at various conferences. People loved it and I was repeatedly asked if I would make another one to sell. That model was beset with problems though, the motor continuously broke and I cracked the glass on the face while building it so I realised this was never going to be something I could replicate and sell for a reasonable cost.
A year ago I came across a clock made from laser cut wood with a dial with numbers on that rotated continuously to show the current time. The ease of building and replicating this made me realise it was an ideal candidate for a reproducible and saleable version of the location clock, and so the WhereDial was born!
I spent a day with a laser cutter building the first model just to confirm it was possible, came up with a reasonable price and then put up a web page to collect orders. I felt I had my minimum viable product and would use a kickstarter style process to collect orders, only committing to fulfill them once I'd got 50 orders. After around 20 orders I got giddy and ordered some motors, as it got closer to Christmas I decided to send out an email to my customers and let them know I would be making the WhereDial but unfortunately wouldn't have time to get it done before Christmas.
As time went on though I got busy with other projects and had hit a bump in the road. I wanted to design a PCB to hold the custom components used by the WhereDial but this was something I'd never done before and didn't really know where to start. In the end it wasn't such a bad thing that I delayed as it gave me time to try out different arrangements of controls and components so that we've now got a design I'm really happy with. At the end of August I finally ordered the PCBs and they turned up 2 weeks later and worked perfectly.
So now we're a year on in the project, where am I and most importantly will I be delivering WhereDials in time for Christmas? Well, the hardware is actually almost complete. I need to do some more testing of the Arduino software but it does seem to work when connected to the internet properly. Now unfortunately I've realised that there is still a fair amount of work to do on the web service that the WhereDial connects to and on the ordering process (because people really want to order custom dials!) That side of things is going to make things more tricky for getting everything sorted by Christmas but I think that so long as I get the WhereDial into people's homes with a workable interface I'll be able to build on this in the future to add more support for other location services.
If you find the WhereDial interesting then keep an eye on its twitter account http://twitter.com/WhereDial or the MapMe.At blog for more information: http://blog.mapme.at/ - and if you want to order one, then head over to http://www.wheredial.com/