FriendlyStack

The electronics for the new control unit are prebuilt and sourced from China via AliExpress. Therefore it is not surprising that they are very competitively priced (chiefly for cheap). Even though the quality is surprisingly good, most people won't enjoy looking at bare electronics on their desk (apart maybe from some engineers). I therefore spent a few hours in front of my CAD system to dress those PCBs in white… Rendered view of the new case design The idea was to create a classic looking case which can house the electronics without the need for any tools. This means the microcontroler board should simply snap into place and stay there. At least theoretically, If my measuring and drawing was correct and the 3D printing guys do a decent job. I opted for polyamide SLS printing (Selective Laser Sintering) as it is cost effective and usually delivers good results. Nevertheless, getting the fit right usually requires a few iterations... Drawing a case for e...

Sometimes progress looks unassuming, especially if it has traveled around the globe in a filthy yellow blister bag. Inside however, is the hardware for the new FriendlyStack Control Unit. This is progress you can measure: Three generations of FriendlyStack Control Units The new hardware platform consists of a Chinese made CPU module and a touch screen module. Both are globally available (thanks to AliExpress) and very cheap! So far the only disadvantage is, that the pin header required for mounting the display are not already soldered to the CPU module. This is however very easy to do and will be covered in a later post. While I still need to spend a few hours on the CAD to design a pretty case, the software side has already made quite some progress: Stay tuned for more...

Oh, it looks like I was carried away by my excitement and totally forgot to tell you what is going to change 😳 Control Unit: coming up with an affordable, functional and good looking option that does not involve large scale manufacturing and shipment logistics. Heck, maybe even design a version of FriendlyStack that works without a control unit! Scanner Support: so far FriendlyStack requires a Linux compatible scanner and some configuration to enable scanning. Only a handful of scanners is currently supported "out of the box". While the number of supported scanners will grow (community support is key) I will add (actually I did so a few days ago) support for network scanning. This will work with any scanner capable of scanning into a PDF file on a Windows/Samba share. Campaign and Your Involvement: let's try something different! FriendlyStack is fully functional and open source. You can download it any time you like and give it a try (ok, for now you still n...

The control unit is how FriendlyStack interacts with you in the physical world. You use it to initiate scans or backups and you see if FriendlyStack is busy or if a problem occurred. To keep things simple it has just one button (well actually it's a touch sensor), a display and it is beautifully illuminated to indicate it's status without even looking at the display (you guessed it, it turns red when there is a problem)... The custom built FriendlyStack Control Unit Actually I've built quite a few of them while honing the design... Building your own custom hardware is cool, but ... Large scale production sucks! Certification paperwork is boring, expensive and it sucks! Shipment logistics suck as well! Therefore: goodbye little friend 😥

I don't like spending time sorting, filing and searching through documents. A few years ago I started testing various commercial document management solutions. Unfortunately they all had the same drawback: instead of reducing the amount of work, they just replaced boring work with more boring work... Being an engineer, I knew I could do better than this and built a document management appliance (yes, like a toaster) for lazy people. It's called FriendlyStack , it's open source   and it's being heavily used by family, friends and myself for over two years. In order to share FriendlyStack with the world, I launched two crowdfunding campaigns ( Campaign 1 , Campaign 2 ),  which failed miserably  😞 After picking up the pieces (well yes, failed crowdfunding campaigns suck!) I figured out what went wrong. Join me while I sort things out, provide feedback and enjoy FriendlyStack while it evolves...