Coming Full Circle

Recently I've decided to revisit a project I more or less put away about 3 years ago....

Those of you who know me will recognize from the pics what this is. For the rest of you here is some background:

In 2009 I was working a job that was beginning to go nowhere in terms of monetary compensation, and therefore i both had little motivation to do the work, and much motivation to find some other way to make money.

During this period I started working on a chastity/timelock safe project. I took an off-the-shelf battery operated safe, and gutted it. I installed an LCD, salvaged the solenoid and keypad from it, and got out my handy micro controller development kit.  Over the next 4 months I made SIGNIFICANT headway on this project, to the point that I was nearly ready to prototype boards for it and assemble the first models for my beta group. Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say this safe would do significantly more than just lock using a code you choose.

In December of 2009, just as I was getting ready to wrap up this project, out of the blue I got a job offer from a very reputable technology company, and based on my employment situation, I accepted it. Needless to say the learning curve of this new job, combined with longer hours than i had previously worked combined to partially (but not totally) derail this project.

For the next 4 months, I diligently put time into debugging code and hardware and nailing down the details of this project. Then in April of 2010, a very good friend whom I have blogged about before, Bodisama, passed away.

Needless to say, since I started this project, and was working on it with his continued encouragement, my drive to continue in this endeavor dropped to practically nil.

For the next 3 years, the project, which was 95 percent ready to go, sat under a desk in the office at my house and collected dust.

Some good friends recently have prompted me (purposefully or inadvertently) to pick back up where I left off with some of these technology projects. Today I am working on this project again with a renewed energy and hope to show some results in the next 2 weeks. My goal is an alpha model prototype in 2 weeks or bust.

So to those folks who have gently or not so gently prodded me back into action on these things, I just wanted to say thanks individually:

• bikermtl - Thank you for gently prodding me to get your safe done before we all die of old age.
• scubaccs/rocket - Thank you for being a catalyst for my creativity and a perverse outlet.
• johnnygear -  Thank you for being another to gently prod me, and answer my dumb software questions.
• rbrpissboy - Thank you for answering my hardware and software questions, and helping me fix issues that are making me want to smash things.

Also, and possibly most of all, thanks to all of the above, and every one else for your ideas, and for being there to bounce ideas off of when the need arises.

Here are some photos of the safe and some hardware as it sits:

-rf