I’m a retired industrial control system engineer, playing around with IoT stuff in my home & elsewhere to keep myself out of my wife’s hair. 72 years old, lots of spare time & enthusiasm but possibly a bit “old school”. Looking forward to learning new stuff!
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Welcome! It’s great to have you here.
Spare time and enthusiasm is all that is necessary here. And the being a bit “old school” seems to be a pretty common thing among Jumperless users (myself included), like half our conversations on the Jumperless Discord Server are about fixing vacuum tube equipment.
And the switching matrix itself is basically a telephone network, so most of the inspiration and theory came from 1960s papers written by engineers from Bell Labs.
So yeah, I think you’ll fit right in.
Thanks! I’m in awe of what you’ve done with this gadget - and even more amazed at the price you’re able to sell it at! Really, should be worth a lot more given the time and creativity you’ve put into it!
Hey thanks! My mentality is that I don’t charge for my time because it’s my favorite thing to do and getting costs down to a reasonable level is just another fun engineering problem (and maintaining a really good personal relationship with my manufacturers). It would seriously cost more to pay me not to work on this thing.
If you want to see where this is going, I’m currently working on the next version, Jumperless V5.
But don’t worry that you just bought an original Jumperless, you’ll have the option to be a beta tester and get one for exactly what they cost me to make (roughly 50% off). And the regular price won’t be too much higher.
Thanks very much for the offer - I’d like to try the V5 when it’s ready, provided I can make my current one work first. It’s a different paradigm from what I’m used to, so I’m a bit slow on the uptake here…
Anyway, please keep me posted - I’m very interested!
Yeah the whole “doing stuff on a computer and then it happens in hardware” thing is weird and takes some getting used to.
The V5 is mostly about making it feel completely intuitive as if it was a regular breadboard. The prime directive for it is to make hooking it up to a computer completely optional, the probe and the rotary encoder can do everything so you really only need power from the USB port.
I didn’t really add many “features” to V5, mainly just having enough LEDs to show text and a probe that’s completely separate from the switching matrix (the original probe was thought of long after the hardware was made, it was a pure hack to get it to work) is really the only major change. But they make it feel a lot more “magical” and give it a much shallower learning curve.
In principle, you could do most of this stuff on an original Jumperless, the only thing that was stopping me is that it would require a big printed user manual to navigate because it can only really communicate with colors.
Put your email in that Crowd Supply page and it’ll send you updates when things happen with it. And it helps things move along quicker because CS uses sign ups to gauge interest.
Oh, wow - that looks really cool!
I’m signed up!