Peopl
do mention it when they come round and see it all working, but to make it viable for sale, the equipment would be very expensive. Touchscreens (at least decent ones) are around 500 quid, all the motors etc... couldn't really be cut out of cheap hand-held drills from Homebase etc... Likewise the PCs, the machines (for the most part the 'satelite' ones at least) are old machines that people were throwing out that I've scrubbed and put Xubuntu on to breath new life into them.

I think just to get the touchscreen and lights/amps etc... working for sale would mean it would have to cost around 2-3000 quid.
(dchurch bah, Thu 20 Aug 2009, 16:28, 1 reply)

Yeah, that's it
With home projects you can cut corners and get things working 80-90% and it's ok. If something breaks you can fix it. You try doing this for someone with low tech ability, they will be haranguing you every other day.

And the more expensive it is, the greater the expectation that it will work 100% all the time and nothing will go wrong.
( Sextant goes to him is emotionally erect, on this day, Sun 23 Aug 2009, 2:44, closed)

^^^
Spot on. For instance, I know the door opener from the touchscreen works 80-90% of the time. I know that the TV works around 95% of the time, and I know how to fix it when it goes wrong.

I probably could make all this work 99.9% of the time, but not all the time I'm tinkering with it - it's to be expected. Sometimes when I have an idea, it means changing some of the stuff that works...and that means that the stuff that works, will invariably end up NOT working until I bodge it through.

It would take a hell of a lot of work and dosh to make something like this commercially viable, but then I suppose that's what that Dragon's Den is all about.
(dchurch bah, Sun 23 Aug 2009, 14:33, closed)