Being new to his site, I joined a few months ago, I would like to share some ideas on the coop's
First; I was surprised that there is someone designing new electronics, custom made for the DIY community. RJ, you just seem to be a person with the highest quality, drive, imagination. You obviously are a gifted hardware and software engineer. I am not sure why you offer so much of yourself to the community, thanks!
The prices that DIY equipment can be purchased here just , at first, seemed unreal.
The growth that this site has seen (what, 1200 memebers last year, 2500 this year)? amazing. As RGB comes out, as you make new hardware available that does amazing things. LE, Aether, Smart strings, wireless dmx, .etc., the growth is probably going to continue
Your goal was to allow someone without previous hardware/software experience to enter this DIY Christmas light world. You succeeded.
What about the scale-ability of the current process. Next year, 5000 people?
I would open this thread to ideas to help this process grow.
Here are some of my ideas
1) How about a $1 fee per device to go to the coop managers. I would gladly pay an extra dollar for each device to have the advantage of getting this quality of product and kit. I feel these people (i saw the video of JJ packing), should get something for their work.
2) Maybe a way to have people queue their requests into a database for the products they would want. The upside of this is everyone could get in, the big downside is that someone would need to write the software to basically queue, sort, prioritize the people. I would be willing to offer to write the software to do this , after i also work on the RGBSB project. One advantage to a process that takes maybe 500 people asking for xx LE kits would be able to spread the work load, establish some system to fairly allocate a limited resource.
I do believe the current process can work going forward, but the success of this site is going to one day cause a lot of turmoil.
People can always buy the boards and pay $30 or so more per kit. But maybe a queuing system would actually reduce the number of PM's being sent around and make everyone's life less stressful.
I ordered 4 LE kits while i was in the Ukraine visiting my wife's parents over new years. They have very little WIFI in the city of Kharkov. The only place i could get on was McDonald's. So there i was in Kharkov, 10pm at night, ordering my 4 kits.
So, i already got my kits. Later this year, i will get an Ethernet dongle and some smart strings.
Please, this is not a criticism of the way it has been done, i really appreciate all that people do here. In the spirit of this site is why i am building the RGB Sequence builder.
Any other ideas of how to scale the coop process into the future?
thanks
sean
