Now that many of us on this forum have spent countless hours advising Spork about powering his secret project, I would like to make a guess as to what this project might be.
My guess: Spork is turning his basement into a node for a VPN. If so, his revenue will depend on up time and throughput but the IT administrators want control of things like powering down servers and routing data. But a power outage won’t be the end of this business model because the customers can be automatically connected via another node. The VPN saves a ton of money by not needing to be located in expensive data centers plus they have a continuous tech on site. It could be a nice steady source of income that may grow. Worst case the VPN goes out of business leaving Spork with a sizeable investment not yet amortized.
I wish I could say yes or no. I have a gentleman working with me now, and he's good, but he doesn't even know the grand scheme, just the stuff he needs to work.
Originally, I designed something, years ago, and I believed in open hardware / open software. I thought that by releasing our invention open hardware / open software, people would come together and work on it as a team, much like they did with the original open-source PS3 Toolchain. I developed the circuit board, released under a GPL license, he programmed the microcontroller.
Then the next thing I know, he's selling a slightly modified version on his site. Turns out we had different ideas of what the purpose of the open hardware / open software was. Unfortunately, under the license I had used, he was fully within the rights to legally do what he did. However, his run has ended and he made a little bit of money I'm guessing, but that was it. He couldn't improve the design any, because he didn't really know it.
I've spent a lot of years learning more, a lot more. Reading various books on circuit design, saving up money to purchase expensive software, talking to various companies who are interested in selling what we're working on, etc.
Anyway, I wanted to apologize for my absence. It seems there's something more wrong with me then just stress. Yesterday, my wife came home from work at 0945 to meet her mother and give her a gift for her sister. She couldn't wake me up. For some still unknown reason, she didn't call for help or anything and just left me and gave our daughter to her mother to watch.
I passed out the night before for a couple hours. When I woke, I knew my sugar was off and thought I fixed it. I slept over 15 hours the other night!!!! When I finally woke up at around 1330, I realized something was really wrong. I wanted to sleep SOOOOO bad, but saw coffee next to the bed and drank it. It had enough sugar in it to get me out of bed and I measured my sugar level. It was soooo low, the meter wouldn't recognize it. I spent all day yesterday trying to stabilize. I've had hypoglycemia for a while, but I've never had an issue (until recently) of my sugar going too high. And usually, I was good just eating three squares a day, but now, that doesn't appear to be enough.
Lost a lot of weight real quick like (2 - 3 lbs a week). Gotta pee all the time. And what feels like my right kidney is freaking killing me! So I go into the docs today at 1440 to get looked at, yet again.