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Weeknotes

Weeknotes #7

I've finally emerged from monk mode after locking in to beat Silksong pass my final semester to provide you with updates! Contrary to popular belief, I did not get hit by a truck. (Actually our co-founder did, but she's doing okay now.) Over the past few months, we've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes, which has made it hard to write consistent public updates, but now we're able to share!

🔥 Highlights

  • Sold 100 tinyCore kits!
  • Piloting the board in 4 classes at CU
  • Finished our first contract with a startup to prototype their product with tinyCore
  • Finished the NSF I-Corps 3-week accelerator program
  • Got accepted into 2 more accelerators: Spark CU and Techsource Venture Accelerator (TVX)
  • Bought a new domain: tinycore.cc

Accelerators

In August, we completed NSF I-Corps training, which included 20+ customer interviews and helped us re-focus on how we define our customer segements. And after finishing that 3-week intensive, we've also been accepted into two more incredible startup accelerators:

Spark CU and Techsource Venture Accelerator (TVX)! Both programs have already helped us refine our pitch and marketing strategy, meet mentors, and prepare for funding.

Campus Traction at CU

This semester has been especially successful with regards to our pilot program at CU. We currently have four courses on campus that endorse tinyCore for their hardware kit options, and have sold 13 units to professors. We've also taught 2 "Intro to tinyCore" classes in the ITLL and BTU Lab makerspaces. It was great to see what students made in under an hour!

Here's a Hello-World demo running on an OLED that was made by a student during one of these demos:

And students have already begun using tinyCore in their projects, which we will highlight more later in the semester. I've already seen a giant fishing reel game controller, some wearable devices, and I'm really excited to share them soon.

Sales Milestone

We have just hit 100 kits sold, and shipped our first international order! It did require developing some new processes and lots of learning (turns out UPS and USPS labels are easy to mix-up when you're sorting packages).

We almost ran out of tinyCores, but another shipment just arrived so we've got a fresh new batch sporting a useful, much-requested feature: an accessible 5V pin! This will be extremely helpful once we start shipping our smart LED hats, which require 5V input.

Startup Partnerships and Community Projects

I'm also excited to announce our first partnership with a startup called Hapware to help them prototype their smart glasses for the visually impared. They contracted the tinyCore team to develop one of their demo units, and it was a fun experience! You can learn more about their awesome venture here.

We're also launching a partnership program for professors on campus to work with the tinyCore team to develop their own tinyHATs, and we've got our first partner, which we are working on an EKG hat for. I can't reveal more just yet, but I'm excited to share soon.

Lastly, I wanted to do a community shoutout to Vince (@stelle_space), a student founder building a model rocket telemetry device called FROG avionics, which uses tinyCore! Vince has developed his own custom tinyHAT that fits nicely inside his rockets, and he even sky-dived with the tinyCore to test out the accuracy. You can follow his project here.

tinyForge

Our browser-based coding and circuit design tool, tinyForge, is almost ready for beta. We've begun the final integrations of the Arduino CLI and USB Serial communications into the software. I'm very excited for users to get their hands on it. We're aiming for a beta release before the end of the year. Early adopters will get priority access to this, and lifetime access as a thank-you for supporting the project!

New Domain Who Dis?

I've talked with a hundred customers at this point and watched how people find our site, and.. it's rough. Most people don't know that .industries is a top-level domain (like .com), and so I've watched many times as people type in "mr.industries.com" and come up with a broken site. Not to mention Google doesn't understand tinyCore SEO at all.

To help with this, I've purchased two new domains, which we will slowly transition to become the official domains of the tinyCore project: tinycore.cc and tinycore.net. Hopefully this will help lead more users to the site (we've already seen an uptick in analytics since doing this) and make it easier to google search. (And maybe someday we can afford to buy tinycore.com!)

Right now, both addresses redirect to mr.industries, but eventually we’ll flip that so mr.industries points to tinycore.cc instead. There may be some brief downtime while we sort out DNS, so if the site is down for a bit, don’t worry, it’ll be back up shortly!

If you share the project, please start using: https://tinycore.cc or https://tinycore.net

What's Next

  • Finishing the tinyForge Beta

  • Finalizing our Kickstarter campaign

  • Publishing curriculum resources

  • Continuing our work with accelerators

  • Shipping more kits and growing the community

Thanks for sticking with us during monk mode. We're back.

Weeknotes #6

Holy cow it was a crazy week! Open Sauce, tinySwag, TikTok, and more!

🔥 Highlights

  • Tested and Prepared 50 tinyCore Kits
  • Designed and Built our booth
  • Drove 5000 miles to present at Open Sauce!
  • Started posting on socials (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube)
  • Sold through all of our kits!!
  • Debuted a demo of our new software: tinyForge

Open Sauce

Last weekend was our first public debut of tinyCore at a convention.. and we SOLD OUT!!

The entire event was awesome, we met so many amazing people and welcomed tons of new fans to the tinyClub! Most of our time outside of Open Sauce was spent cutting business cards, folding zines, and testing the props for our booth. We also got an opportunity to demo our software and share some future tinyCore add-ons. Here's the tinyCrew in action!

Half the team flew to San Francisco while the other half drove the 2500 miles from Colorado to California. We had a mini team road trip!

Aiden’s mom made us custom shirts to help us look more professional :)

For some tinyCore swag, we ordered stickers in all of our board colors and even some shinyCore’s too. We also made our own DIY tinyCore Fridge magnets!

  • MAGNETSSSS

Here's us setting up the booth..

  • i am hepful

  • Halfway done!

Then the team got to work selling tinyCore’s and getting the word out. People loved the project so much that we sold out of all the kits we brought. We had to start redirecting buyers to our website!

The rest of our time was spent testing boards, filming content, and team bonding at our AirBnB!

We also got to demo the eufyMake E1 for UV-printing labels on our enclosures... The results were fantastic.. Might have to buy one of these now:

Most of this has been shared on our new social accounts!

TikTok and Instagram

I'm not a big user of social media, but prior to leaving for Open Sauce, I realized we were gonna need socials if people wanted to follow the project. Because of that, we've updated our handle to @mister.industries for all our accounts, and opened a TikTok and Instagram under the same name. (Psssst!.. You should follow us!)

Here's our shorts from Open Sauce:

https://www.tiktok.com/@mister.industries/video/7530912567179349261 https://www.tiktok.com/@mister.industries/video/7531179979657252109

tinyForge

For the last month, we've been developing an IDE for programming the tinyCore in the browser, and we got to reveal the demo to hundreds of people at Open Sauce! I'd like to give everyone here a preview of how it looks as well.

This is the main page, where you can open a project or load example code from our documentation.

Once you’ve opened your project/GitHub repo, you can immediately view the documentation and code side-by-side, and edit with either Arduino C or Blockly! (CircuitPython will also be available in the future.)

And under the circuit tab, you can view the wiring diagram for your project! (At the moment this is a static picture that will load with the project, but later we will be making this a dynamic editor.)

This is still very early in development, but we are hoping to share the beta within the next few months. Also, all early adopters will receive priority access and lifetime subscriptions. This is our way of saying thank you for supporting our project!

Events & Opportunities

We're still recovering from Open Sauce, but that doesn't mean we're gonna stop. Future plans and in-person tinyCore events are as follows:

  • We are currently scheduling a demo day for tinyCore at the Clear Creek Makerspace during the first week of August!

  • We're also working with the Boulder Public Library to start a tinyCore class.

  • And lastly, we're developing a hackathon event for CU Boulder this coming Fall of 2025.

All of these dates are TBA.

Thanks again for visiting us at Open Sauce!

What's Next

  • Finishing the tinyForge Beta
  • Further development of the Expansion Modules
  • Running Community Classes
  • Further Development of our Documentation!

Weeknotes #5

Here's what's happened at Mr. Industries in the last few weeks:

  • Finalized our testing procedures and began soldering and testing units
  • Listed our product on Tindie!
  • Posted two tinyCore projects on Instructables
  • Won the Wearables Instructables contest!
  • Gave the website a facelift
  • Designed our super secret online coding agent
  • Onboarded a Software Engineer :)

Also I'm in Ireland...

Weeknotes #4

If you're keeping count, you'll noticed we missed last week, and that's because we're still a student-run company (until next semester). However, with finals over, we've got a bunch of good updates to share! Here's what happened this week (and last):

  • Presented tinyCore via OpenHEG during CU Boulder's Senior Engineering Expo
  • Shared our project at CU's ATLAS Expo
  • Made some banger new business cards
  • Sold and tested more kits
  • Refined our Kit of Parts (now with a sweet treat)
  • Won a 9k Microgrant from Clear Creek Makerspace!
  • Begun editing our "How it's made - tinyCore" Video

Weeknotes #3

In the face of midterms and final projects, we continued to make progress on tinyCore! Here's what happened this week:

  • Began testing V2.1 PCBs
  • Attended First Pitch Colorado
  • Met with more professors for our Fall Cohort
  • Presented tinyCore at the Mines Entrepreneurship
  • Showcase
  • Shipped our first online orders
  • GOT ACCEPTED FOR OPEN SAUCE!!

Weeknotes #2

Hey everyone! Welcome to this week's Wednesday Weeknote. Here's what we've been up to:

🔥 Highlights

  • Sexy new documentation website
  • Presented at the 20th Anniversary Celebration for Clear Creek Makerspace
  • Applied to the Underdogs Grant fund by MatrixOwl
  • Hand-delivered a tinyCore V2 Starter Kit to a certain YouTuber 😎
  • Our latest shipment of PCBs as arrived! (Next up: Testinggg)

Weeknotes #1

We're changing up our Devnotes to from monthly to weekly updates! The goal of this is to promote "working with the garage door open," giving (you) our followers the inside scoop on our progress and decisions. Let's get into the weeknote:

This week was crazy! For starters, we released a 2 minute teaser for the tinyCore, and it blew up! (at least for us). It's currently standing at just over 2k views! You can check it out here if you missed it: https://youtu.be/wqKJGHjnWzM