Making a gadget factory.

I've been overwhelmed by illness for the past few months. Nausea, fatigue, confuddled thoughts. Basically a write-off.

My friend Marty has been in a similar situation after coming off his motor bike. He however seems to be healing much faster than I and is madly thinking up gadgets he and I can design and assemble.

I've wanted to put together a gadget factory for a while now. It's hard to justify the cost of some of the tools you need to assemble gadgets these days. They're heaps cheaper than when I was starting out as a gadget maker in the '70s but it's still a lot of money for me now that I'm attempting to live on my pension. So it occurred to me that if we could actually sell some of these gadgets it might make the factory a bit better than a sinkhole into which I pour my dollars.

To add to the impetus to start a business is the weakening Australian dollar. Makes the gadgets even cheaper to US and EU customers. And I also discovered another effect of the weak dollar. Some Australian Ebay sellers have purchased stock from China in USD. It literally halves the price of one expensive tool I was looking at.

So some gadgets we've been toying with.

1. Marty thinks an automatic "fall over" light for bikes would be useful. Simple, easy to design and build, a ready market among his bikie friends.
2. Elevator music player + WiFi repeater. Repeaters are dirt cheap but if you could add a web site to the repeater which replays non-repeating, synthesised guitar music, every office can plug one in and switch people to the music site when they are on hold. No music royalties, no maintenance to change DVDs etc
3. Credit-card-sized tin with accelerometers to act as an effect pedal. Ultra-low powered circuit (3xAAAs for a year). Basic effects by default, programmable over WiFi and/or BLE (use Apple Watch as control unit).
4. Simplified iPhone and/or AW app to control RGB LED strips.