MCQN Ltd

Week 1055-1058 - Build us lots and lots..

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“It feels like an age since Christmas”, “Why can’t we have that ripe brie all the time?”, “No, you put it in the loft I didn’t even want an illuminated reindeer”, “We should probably get some new year weeknotes written” and all the other usual greetings of the new year. So happy new year from MCQN. No prizes for guessing it’s Chris’s turn to write the notes this time, but an on the turn mince pie to the first person who names the band behind the 80s pop song referenced in the title.

Our big news is the pcb’s for the next batch of Museum in a Box arrived. The shop is back open and we’ve already got boards crossing the country, and the Atlantic.

Julie has joined us to build, flash and pack the next batch and is doing great work gluing, screwing and packing them up ready to go. She’s got a production line system set up that would put Henry Ford to shame. They’re being built in any colour you like as long as it’s black, or pink, or yellow, or blue or transparent. So objectively already five times better before we’ve even started..

This new stock has also triggered Adrian getting involved in a battle with Chilliean government procurement systems to complete an order. In turn this led to a related, and no less confusing, deep dive into the tarrif agreements between the UK and Chilie. He’s also had £150 worth of phone arguments with a certain courier’s USA based AI ‘assistant’ to track down parcels which took months to arrive with a customer. He doesn’t want to talk about it, but the parcels have now arrived.

I have been testing a new batch of Vicino boards that we use in the boxes so a chance to pull out the test rig run some checks before the boxes are assembled. Each is checked for performance before the headers are soldering and they are connected to the main board.

We had some very useful feedback on the zine we send with My Bike’s got LED kits, so I also made some time to update these instructions.

Finally, and in anticipation of the influx of new stock I spent some time archiving and sorting some of our office, well there’s a better phrase than acquired junk, but I can’t remember it right now. Everything has been corralled into ‘Archive’, ‘Medium term storage’ and ‘current stock’. While this has generally made the space a little tidier, it’s not helping us track down the nuts and washers we need to connect the potentionmeters to the boxes. The search continues…

Week 1054 - Riding Home for Christmas

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

More pictures than words in this week’s weeknotes.

Chris is slipping deeper into the ESP-IDF implementation of LWIP to make the long promised UI updates to Museum in a Box. It’s quite possible he’s now not waving.

As light relief he made a 3d printed object to hold the tag of Neil’s DoES Liverpool Christmas party song. It’s the season of goodwill so he’s not going to link to the song…

The raw materials (although calling a load of laser-cut acrylic waiting to be assembled into boxes raw material may be a bit of a stretch) for the next batch of Museum in a Box is looming—literally as well as figuratively—over us. We’re just waiting for the PCBs to arrive now and then can begin the process of making everything take up more space in the office as we turn them into boxes ready to ship out.

Adrian has reminded himself that it’s tricky to get good video footage of LEDs on bikes. Especially when you’re at the back of the ride and the trike covered in LEDs being ridden by a rider wearing some LED-illuminated angel wings is at the front.

Still, he’s salvaged some of the footage and there’s plenty of our work on show if you know where to look. An assorment of the bikes are sporting the full My Bike’s Got LED kit; the Heartlight he mentioned last week is on the leading disco bike; our audio level-shifter is part of the radio link between the front and rear disco bikes (Adrian was riding the rear one, which is where the camera is mounted); and three Lightbeam units are mounted on the back of the trike.

It was a slightly slower and shorter group ride than the typical JoyRides because kids were invited along to this one. The youngest rider joined in on her balance bike!

Week 1053 - What's on the end of the stick..?

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Chris this week, spending more time than is reasonable working out how to keep the 90s TV references going..

Little by little the constituent parts of the next batch of Museum in a Box are turning up at HQ. We’ll know it’s Christmas here when the shelves are full of new stock. Thanks to the good folk at Pimoroni the cases are here and ready for assembly. We have a bag of bespoke standoffs, that needed more than a bit of head scratching to calculate how many factions of an inch we needed. As soon as the PCB’s arrive from Glasgow we’ll be in the workshop assembling, it’s not yet clear if elf costumes will be required.

While the boards are being assembled I’m still trying to get the UI updates finished off in time, the clock is ticking. It’d be great to have this tested ready for the new batch but the battle with web sockets in the ESP-idf continues and may yet go to a penalty shoot out.

Another parcel we received this week was from the British Library. They have a large number of Museums in a Box across the country, one had been in an unfortunate accident. It was returned to us packed in a nest of shredded cardboard to see if we could save it. A little bit of soldering, some new lasercut box pieces and it’s ready to go back out to the library.

Adrian has earwormed himself with Neil Diamond this week, as he’s finished off the heart light he’d started on last week.

He continued the repurposing waste theme, harvesting a small rechargeable li-ion battery from a disposable vape and wiring it up with a small toggle switch from the DoES Liverpool parts bin.

The finished unit makes a nice bright pink heart to sit atop of the transmitter for the lead soundsystem bike on our group rides, so the chasing receiver bike can keep track of it and make sure they’re in range.

He also spent some time in FreeCAD designing a mount for a bike light for the ligra projector he showed last week. In the end the bike ride he was building it for was postponed due to the weather, so hopefully there’ll be a photo of it when that’s rescheduled.

And wrapping his week up, he went along to the Liverpool Synth Meeup on Saturday and worked out how to get an ESP32C3 hooked up to a small I2S DAC and amp, and then get it to make sounds from some Circuit Python code. There might be more on that in the future, but it’s something of a back-burner R&D project.

Week 1052 - A Little Bit of Politics

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Adrian’s turn this week, but I’m continuing the trend of 90s UK comedy TV references for the title.

I spent some time laying the ground for an upgrade of the online platform we use for Museum in a Box. It’s a custom website written in Python and Django that’s running on the Heroku infrastructure; so needs periodic maintenance to move up to newer versions of all of that stack. It’s not something we work on day-in day-out, so the first step is reading up on the new features, bug-fixes, etc. for the later versions to check that nothing is likely to break; and planning the steps to work through. Next will be the working through.

I’ve been on more familiar ground with some work for a bike event we’re helping with. This coming Friday there’ll be a light and music bike parade kid-friendly edition of the regular JoyRide group rides.

We’ve been pimping out a trike with some My Bike’s Got LED kits, and working on a couple of related projects:

Channelling our inner-Libby Miller to repurpose old bike brake cables into scaffolding for an LED noodle.

And doing some work in FreeCAD to customise a version of Jana M. Hemsing’s Ligra projector.

Chris is using the time to dive back into the Museum in a Box code to work through the issues list. It feels a bit like swimming through treacle but there is progress and it’s good to have a chunk of time to move things on.

He also discovered that we have unintentionally been shipping small electrical heaters internationally. Or more accurately, because the courier we use has updated their website with a new HS code generator for exports, we discovered that their previous HS code generator gave us a code which was a long way away from describing the Museum in a Box we’d been using it for. We’re now accurately shipping, ‘Small, electrical, other’. Along the way we discovered that, for reasons unknown, there is a specific code for an ‘An electronic sound generator, creating an analog signal for a device producing the sound of an engine”, but not for an NFC reading box to play audio in Museums and Galleries. It’s not clear if this is an argument for more or less government.

In other news he’s going to remember to take more photos to help him remember what else he did for weeknoting.

Weeks 1050 and 1051 - Smoke me a kipper..

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Chris this week, and a week behind but in my defence last week my blood was 75% Menthol, Honey and Lemon and my nose was 100%, well you don’t need to know.

We have been busy shipping Museums in Boxes, so much so that a new batch has been ordered and you can expect some box assembling in upcoming weeknotes. We’ve got boxes heading to Bath, Massachusetts and Oregon as I type. We’re still Antarctica short of a box on every continent so anyone with a contact at the BAS who wants Penguins in a Box is welcome to get in touch.

I got to join in with Freecad Friday with a quick badge design. A Museum in a Box in Reading developed a fault and after doing our best to fix it remotely we decided it needed to come back to us for some open front surgery. (Swapping out a potentially faulty SD card.) After discussion with the customer they decided they would like to have a go at the fix themselves. Assembling and disassembling boxes is routine for us, and we have instructions on our website to show people how, but if you’ve never done it before it can be a daunting task. So to celebrate their intrepid spirit we conferred the title ‘Second technician’. Of course a title isn’t worth much unless there is a badge to go with it, and we have a 3d printer or two so we made them one.

With a new batch of Museum in a Box boxes due it’s also the time we’re working through inventories and collecting together all the components that make up a box. Most of the laser cutting is done off site but as part of the pcb assembly there is a small acrylic shim that needs to be consigned for pcb fabrication. These have been cut and posted so they’re ready for the soldering of the display lights board. We’re not a completely JIT manufacturer but with some getting lost in transit we might have got close with this component.

Adrian finished the My Bike’s Got LED packaging he talked about in the last weeknotes. With a tweak to the tabs that hold the board in place, and extending the battery panel to hook in place it’s good to ship. With the nights drawing in and a finite number of days left until Christmas you could do worse than look at our Tindie store

Adrian has also moved the Hexanoodle project on, adding the CH32V203F8 chip to the Arduino platform for CH32, as a first step to being able to program the Hexanoodle boards from Arduino.

</source>

A video showing a green Hexanoodle circuit board connected to a blue battery. On the board a green LED is blinking on and off.

Week 1049 - Let's Push Things Forward

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been pushing forwards on a few fronts this week. No major breakthroughs, just nudging things along on a few different projects.

With us nearing the end of this batch of Museum in a Box Chris has been checking over the last few boxes to make sure they’re all good to ship out. With any production batch there’ll be the odd issue here and there. When we’ve got the full batch those QA anomalies get put to one side for us to investigate and re-work later. Now we’re at that later. There were one or two still irretrievable after Chris’ attentions (we order a few more than we need in the production batch, to handle such eventualities) but he’s gotten enough PCBs tidied up to see us through. We need to order a couple of micro-SD cards too, which I (Adrian) will get to this week.

Last week I threatened to break out the oscilloscope to work out why I couldn’t get any code onto the new Hexanoodle prototypes. In the end the threat of it sitting on the desk next to the board was enough. Or maybe it was the break between attempts that let me spot I’d wired up the programming dongle incorrectly. Either way, I can get code onto the CH32V203 chip and the boards work!

The My Bike’s Got LED product work moved on a bit further too. I finished off the design work in FreeCAD with an assortment of fold up tabs added to the design we shared last week:

With the design finished—at least to a point where we can try making one—I got FreeCAD to unfold the design and save it as an SVG; that will then go into the laser-cutter software to let us cut one to test.

Finally, I found time to write up the Active Travel Hackday that we ran a few weeks ago.

Week 1048 - Keepie Uppie

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been getting back to a more regular schedule with the weeknotes and like an 80’s schoolkid in a snorkle parka, playing keepie uppie on the playground at breaktime, I’m determined not to be the one that drops the ball. So just the one week of weeknotes from Chris this week. I’m not using vim but I’ll do my best to be no less vigorous. (As Adrian mentioned last week Neil isnt here now to stop my nonsense.)

After the initial success checking over the new Hexanoodle prototypes, Adrian has found getting code onto them trickier. It’s a chip we haven’t used before, so there’s been both a new toolchain to pick up and new getting-code-onto-the-chip processes to master.

The toolchain and code side (for an initial program, at least) didn’t prove too troublesome; but so far it has resolutely resisted any attempts to get the code onto the chip. This week the oscilloscope will be brought to bear on it, to see if that sheds any light on the situation.

The oscilloscope was also out to help debug the final repair needed for the JoyRide My Bike’s Got LED boxes. That let us track down where a pad on the board had come away from the PCB, which was preventing a crucial clock signal get to the audio board. That’s now fixed and we need to get the boxes back onto the “disco bikes”.

In manufacturing news, after some final checks to the production files—making sure the dots to show the orientation of the tiny (0.6mm by 0.6mm!) variable capacitors were in the right place, as that bug caused no end of trouble on the last batch—the next batch of Museum in a Box circuit boards were ordered from our contract manufacturer in Glasgow.

And there was a bit of time left on #FreeCADFriday to start drawing up the design for the packaging for the My Bike’s Got LED kits

</source>

A video showing an 8 x 32 pixel connected to a sound reactive setup of the My Bike's got LED board in the foereground. The lights are moving in response to a video playing on the laptop behind. The video in the video shows a classical music bike ride with a conductor on a trike. I can't explain it any better.

Along with the Hexanoodle boards we recieved last week were some of the new design My Bike’s got LED boards. All the core components are the same as in the previous version but we made sufficient changes to the layout of the gpio interface to need a new OSHWA accreditation. We were pleased to receive this in Open Source Hardware month, along with the confirmation for Lightbeam accreditation.

The layout change was primarily to incorporate a footprint for the easily available INMP441 microphone breakout boards. The same pins are available on both revisions of the board but the new version allows for the microphone to be connected easily. As with any time a new batch of boards arrived it wasn’t possible to resist testing them for long. As you can see from the video above the setup works well with our build of WLED and the microphone seems very responsive. The next step is to get it fixed to a board and out on the streets.

Weeks 1046 and 1047 - Slide Presentation; Product Presentation

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Fortnight-notes this time, with Adrian back at the keyboard and in vim.

I don’t think we ever got round to a grand announcement when Neil came in to help us look at some of the marketing, website, etc. for both MCQN and Museum in a Box (given they have relatively separate Internet presences). He just snuck in and started working on things. He’s had a similarly French exit—leaving us with a “What would Neil do?” (ask for photos, generally) catchphrase; a stack of things still to work through; and a better understanding of our marketing priorities.

I’m not sure referencing geek command-line editors in the opening sentence of the weeknotes is quite what he had in mind, but still.

Production of future batches of Museum in a Box took a good step forwards this week as we took delivery of a thousand speakers. We (and by we, I mean I) need to get the rest of the manufacturing steps kicked off too, so we’ve got something to plug them into. Especially as we’ve been sending out more Boxes to happy customers; further dwindling the remaining stock in Batch 5.

I also got the write-up of my talk at Rise and Design: Design in the Heritage Sector finished and published on the Museum in a Box blog.

Continuing our celebration of Open Hardware Month, Chris submitted the updated My Bike’s Got LED and related Lightbeam projects to the OSHWA for accreditation.

Alongside this he is updating the documentation for these projects, including what’s possibly our first zine-style user manual; and with dark nights drawing in our minds are focused on all things LED, so he also worked on running repairs for some of the Joyride My Bike’s got LED devices.

My focus for My Bike’s Got LED has been on the packaging. I think the board is great, and the kit has all the parts you’d need to pimp out your bike; however, I’ve had a reticence to be shouting about it. Some of that is my natural aversion to blowing our own trumpet, but I worked out that some of it is that what we were shipping out didn’t match the quality of the product.

So the zine that Chris has been working on is part of that; and the other is to take a leaf out of Museum in a Box’s book and design a custom insert for the packaging. I had some initial thoughts on how that would work; spent lots of time trawling through packaging supplier websites looking for something suitable and off-the-shelf for the outer box; and then did some prototyping with the component parts while getting an order ready to ship. The prototyping resulted in me finding a better way to pull it all together, and we ended up deciding that the Museum in a Box box is near enough to the right size (it’s a bit bigger than we need, but not by much) that the benefit of just keeping one shipping box in stock for both products means we’ll go with that. Next step will be to design and prototype the insert.

I made a mistake in the design for the new Hexanoodle that we mentioned in the last weeknotes. It turns out that as well as the number of pins (20), the package type (QFN), and the chip size (3x3mm), there’s also a choice of two lead pitches (the spacing of the pins round the edge of the chip): 0.4mm and 0.45mm. I’d managed to pick the wrong one in the initial version that I shipped off to manufacturing.

Thankfully it got caught in the initial manufacturing checks and so the only cost was time. I had to cancel that order and resubmit a fixed version.

In the interim I’d also heard that the abusing-WS2812-chips design I was running with might not work as I’d hoped. It seems that it might still be okay but re-thinking it made me realise that I didn’t need the WS2812 chips at all. That was an initial design direction from when it was going to be a micro:bit add-on; as I’d since decided to add a CH32-family processor onto it, there were actually enough pins available to drive the LEDs directly. That meant I could drop three chips from the design which, given the crazy low prices of items from LCSC, didn’t make a huge difference to the bill-of-materials cost but all helps. I might also be able to trim a little from the size with fewer chips to find room for, but I went with fewer changes for a faster re-design for these initial prototypes.

That slowed down me getting the physical PCBs to try out, but they landed on my desk on Friday.

The initial checks were good. The no-connector USB-C has a tiny bit of wiggle to it, but provides power just fine—hopefully it’ll do data too once I get to bringing up the processor—and the charging circuit and 3.3V regulators all pass basic tests.

Now I need to get to grips with coding for the CH32 processors and get some code onto it to see if that side of things works.

Weeks 1043 to 1045 - A flag that has been to the moon

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Imagine a Brian Cox monologue discussing the relative nature of time, and how it is a concept dependent on the reference frame of the observer. While you are busy doing that I’ll slip in, unnoticed, that it’s three weeks since our last weeknotes and we are pushing our luck not just calling it ‘notes’. Yes, it’s Chris this week, how did you know?

Adrian enjoyed returning to Newcastle to present Museum in a Box at the Design Network North conference Rise and Design - Design in the Heritage Sector. It brought back many good memories of the Maker Faires. In preparation for the event we printed some of the Natural History Museum - Make it visible collection. These are models of electron microscope scans of pollen, with Braille descriptions. At the event there were good questions from the audience and some interesting use cases we’d not thought of before. The details of the talk can be found on the catalogue page and the slides will be published on the Museum in a Box blog once Adrian has tidied up his notes.

The first three Museum in a Box boxes in Hawaii are up and running at a community college in Honolulu. A box has gone to Big heritage for use at the Deva Roman experience, and three more are in transit to North Carolina. Which is a roundabout way to say we are very close to selling out the current batch. So if you were thinking about getting one now is a very good time to visit the shop [Turns to camera and grins while holding up a glinting Museum in a Box]

In more Museum in a Box related news we met up with staff at Liverpool Central library who work in the archives. They’re interested in how they can use the boxes they have from the British Library, currently showing Unearthed: The Power of Gardening. We talked about their plans to make oral histories more accessible, and to support exhibitions of the archives across the community libraries. As we were talking about the variety of treasures in the library collections, such as the Audubon book, we got to possibly the best casual remark I’d ever heard in a meeting. “…and there’s the American flag that’s been to the moon…”.

We are embracing Open Hardware Month and will see how many new projects we can certify in October. We will definitely be submitting the Lightbeam the addressable LED bollard we’ve used in active travel projects. A new version of the My Bike’s got LED board is being manufactured at the moment, this has a header compatible with the ubiquitous, circular INMP441 microphone boards. So expect us to be playing more with sound reactive WLED in the near future. The clocks go back soon so we need more brightness in our lives. Adrian is also working on a new board that makes it easy to drive LED noodles, particularly in wearable projects. It’s based on one of the WCH CH32V chips, and linked to the magnetic pogo pin modelling he talked about in the last weeknotes. I’ll leave him to talk about the details when it’s finalised but enough to say it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Weeks 1038 to 1042 - Back to School^h Weeknotes

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0100

The new school year is well underway, so I (Adrian) best get some weeknotes out while I can still shoehorn that metaphor into the title.

We’ve got five weeks to catch up on, so let’s run through the more interesting things as bullet-points; in no particular order:

Neil has been making sure the Museum in a Box got plenty of love; with blog posts on both oral history and ways to share and remix your collections
He also showed off our work at the DoES Liverpool Birthday Open Day
After a comment over on LinkedIn, we knocked up a quick prototype to mash up a Museum in a Box with a microscope. We’ll be writing up a blog post on it, but here’s a sneak peek…

Some of my blogging bandwidth, that could otherwise have gone into weeknotes, went into writing up our thoughts on sharing code and other design files
I did get to do some FreeCAD and Kicad work. There’s a new project on the boil, and it will need some magnetic pogo-pin connectors. I found some good candidate parts, but needed to add them to Kicad so that I can lay out the PCB correctly. That took me into FreeCAD to design the 3D model; then Kicad to lay out the 2D footprint for the board; and back into FreeCAD with the Kicad-stepup workbench to bring the two together:

And speaking of FreeCAD, I had a great chat with Jo Hinchliffe, to talk about the audio-level-shifter project; which he wrote up for the FreeCAD blog
Finally, we’re getting towards the end of this batch of Museum in a Box and so we’re thinking about the next manufacturing run. The first step in that has been to order 1000 speakers.