Hi friends!

Two quick updates this time.

Fancy keyboards

A friend of mine designs and sells high-end custom mechanical keyboard kits:

They had the (awesome) problem of selling out immediately after releasing kits for sale. So for their next release, I convinced them to run a Vickrey auction, which would not only increase immediate revenue, but also measure their demand curve. (Both of which are sort of handy for running a boutique keyboard business).

tl;dr: my friend ran an auction, made a lot more money, and is now flying to Shenzhen to organize a much larger production run.

Read the full article: https://kevinlynagh.com/notes/pricing-niche-products/

CNC computer vision

Last newsletter I mentioned pairing on computer vision, and my collaborator has written up a great overview of our adventures: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2019/08/28/august.html

Among other things, it includes a CAD software selfie of yours truly:

We proved out the feasibility of using a webcam to precisely measure items on a CNC machine bed, so now I’m converting the duct-taped-Python into Rust so I’ll be able to dogfood it on Windows while making some furniture.

Expect a larger update and video demo soon — hopefully later this month, once I finish typing out the Rust type signature for an invertible 8x8 matrix of floats…

Best,

Kevin