Chronulator 2.0 is now available. Come and get ‘em!

Thanks again to everybody who’s been asking for Chronulators for months now. I hope you agree the new design was worth the wait.

OK. Everything is ready. I feel comfortable and confident that Chronulator 2.0 will be a good experience for all my customers. Come tomorrow evening (GMT-8: Pacific Time), Wednesday December 10, Chronulator 2.0 will be available for sale. It was a long time coming, and I am thankful for all your patience.

I’m so excited and so relieved. And so tired. I was up until 4:30AM, attempting to resolve a bootloader problem. There were competing issues… I want the Chronulator to run on worn-out AA batteries, meaning approximately 1.8 volts. According to the Atmel microcontroller specifications, the chip can only run at 4MHz, at a voltage that low. But all the Arduino bootloaders are compiled to run at 8MHz, 16MHz or more. There’s the conflict. I had to recompile the Lilypad Arduino bootloader with a few tweaks. Messing with a crucial piece of code like a bootloader is rather nerve-wracking. So I tested, tested, and tested some more. I also had to mess around with the AVR microcontroller fuses — a risky affair, I’ve learned. I managed to brick one of my boards because I set the microcontroller fuses wrong. Fortunately, I was able to evolve a scripted process that will practically eliminate this sort of error as I burn the Chronulator software on each chip I ship.

This weekend was a long slog. First, I needed to build a programmer so I could efficiently program raw microcontroller chips. I have one of those green zero-insertion-force sockets that I wired up to program chips through the AVR ISP interface. I also worked out a command-line script that does checksums and everything to make sure each chip gets programmed correctly.

I also got all the paperwork in order — the component envelope and shipping labels. I revised the envelopes to reflect the new list of contents, and created a shipping label printing script. I can’t tell you how often I cramped my hand writing out shipping labels for my customers. “Ow, that’s my soldering hand!”

I got the documentation “done”. But before I post it, I must go through it once, with the parts all boxed up just as they’d be shipped. Call it a dry run. The perfectionist in me wants to make sure everything’s right before I unleash Chronulator 2.0 on the world. So first thing tomorrow (Monday) morning, before I go to my day-job, I’m going to assemble a kit from the instructions. I’ll make last-minute adjustments as necessary. At that point, I am ready. When I return from work in the evening, I will update the Web site with all the kit documentation and enable the PayPal “Buy Now” buttons! Then I’ll e-mail everybody who asked to be notified. Then the fun begins!

Thanks everybody for all of your patience and encouragement. I hope you’ll enjoy Chronulator 2.0 even more than the original!

The boards have arrived and look good! I will solder a couple this evening. If they work well, I’ll start packing kits for shipment on Monday and open the store for orders!

On Sunday, I set up the video camera and recorded the Chronulator assembly process a couple of times. My plan is to first grab still images from the video and insert them into the updated Chronulator assembly instructions. But then, I want to edit and post a video assembly guide which I think will be very handy, regardless of your electronics assembly experience. I’m pretty excited about this. You’ll get to see my soldering technique (such as it is), how to fit the microcontroller chip into the board, how to disassemble and reassemble the meters, how to adjust the clock, and a few other activities that are easier to show than to describe in words. Of course, I’m still providing the complete PDF manual, so if you prefer to work from printed documentation, you won’t miss a thing!