Hi.

Well, I'm in a fairly good mood at the moment, as I now have an electronics workshop again.

Let me explain.

My brother is disabled, being afflicted with Friedriech's Ataxis, a rather unpleasant neurological disorder with no known cure or treatment and some interesting effects. He moved to back to Canada about 7 years ago with most of the rest of my family. Ultimately he decided that the rural life wasn't for him, and set his heart on getting a law degree. His condition makes attending university in person difficult, so his thought was to do a distance-learning course. The only one he could find that he liked the look of was at the Open University in the UK, for which he had to be a resident of the UK. So he moved back once again.

Being disabled and in a wheelchair, in theory he gets a number of benefits that will pay for housing, some transportation, etc, and also much of his education costs. Having nowhere else to live until all this was set up, he moved in with me.

Now, for the full effect, you must understand how small my house actually is. It is a mid-terrace two-bedroom house with a (ha ha) back garden and garage. For a north american resident, this doesn't really get across the real size. Put it like this: The house my sister has in Canada is not huge by Canadian standards, but is a reasonable size, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, decent basement, large kitchen, you get the idea.

The entire floor area of my house, including stairwell, would go into the basement of her house more than twice over. Her garage is bigger than my house.

My garage is so small that the car I had when I moved in wouldn't fit inside it and allow me to open the doors to get out. The second bedroom is only called that because you could, with a lot of shoving, get a bed into it. You couldn't close the door afterwards, but...

So, hopefully you get the idea. My house looks like the box a large dollhouse came in.

Add to that furniture, 5000+ books, at least 10 computers, a lot of test gear, model aircraft, a cat, and all the other crap someone like me tends to accumulate, and it's not exactly spacious. So, when someone else moves in, things get cramped.

I had to dismantle my workshop and put most of the equipment in my bedroom, which made it fairly ineffective as either a bedroom or a workshop, move a lot of things around in the kitchen (which is absolutely minute), and dump everything left over into the loft. We got him settled into the former workshop by means of a very narrow folding bed, and I learned not to trip over the wheelchair at the bottom of the stairs in the dark. Eventually. More or less.

He said at the time that he only needed accomodation for a month or two. Three tops. Six at the absolute outside.

That was two years ago.

As you can imagine, work has suffered since then. It was very difficult to do any major projects, and things like tuner kits were a pain in the arse and took over the living room entirely for a week or two every time I did a batch. There isn't a room in the house that wasn't full to the point you had to move things out of the way to get from one side to the other. I pretty much gave up even trying to do serious work, since it took so long to get everything set up that I only had time to play with it for an hour or so before I had to move it all so I could go to bed. Life has obviously been pretty tough on him as well, although his studies don't need as much space as I do.

Anyway, finally, at long last, two weeks ago he finally got the ground level council accomodation he was entitled to, many many many months after starting the paperwork. On Monday he moved out, and both of us breathed a sigh of relief. I have spend the entire week since then cleaning up, repainting the room, moving everything back in, and shifting the debris around thoughout the house to make use of the whole 6 square meters of extra space.

Anyway, the point of all the whingeing is to say Hurrah!, and to mention that now that I have the room I should be able to produce a veritable tide of tuner kits. I have ordered another 100 PCB sets, having run out, and also managed to track down some more MAX4544 chips, which were getting to be in short supply. I have about 200 tuner modules left, and intend to ship all of them as fast as I can manage. After that I doubt I will be doing tuner kits any more.

I will also be getting the PCBs for the memory boards fairly soon, and those should start shipping. The parts list is much smaller for these than the tuners, and the parts are easier to get, so hopefully there shouldn't be any of the delays that have plagued me in the past.

pca

Very cool, Patrick. I'm sure it must feel fantastic to have the space again. All our best to your brother.

Great going, Patrick! Family always comes first! That gets more respect, in my book, than shipping 100 tuner kits...

I couldn't have said it better!

A definite full salute from here - hope your brother is enjoying his course and new accommodation.

When he's a fully fledged lawyer he will probably consider giving you a 5% discount on any future litigation.

G