Take This Job and Shove It

Let me start this off by thanking you all for the support and rally you gave for the Lixie. I was able to quit my day job to make these full-time - I can support my family, the amount of time I have to continue development has doubled, and nowadays I have to do my inventory audits in weight instead of exact quantities. I never dreamed any of this would happen.

Thank you, Hackaday staff and readers.

A Modern Spin On A Retro Tech

With the extra time I have after letting Lixie become my full-time job, I needed to make sure the interest doesn't die out any time soon. This new ad campaign is centered around a slogan: "A Modern Spin On A Retro Tech" - as the Lixies are. To compliment the slogan, I'm running every ad using vintage graphic design & pop culture from the mid-50s to the late 90s! A certain decade has had a revival in the last 10 years - especially after the success of things like Stranger Things, Kung Fury, Halt and Catch Fire, and some reboot films we won't talk about. Let's not forget the synthwave we're often hearing in the air. So to start, we're putting Lixie in the 1980s. Don't get me wrong, there are HUNDREDS of advertising and design subcultures from the era, but so far I've only tackled two of them:

Mid-80s Corporate Electronics Print Ad

The layout was based on this Casio ad from 1986, the title is Kabel Black, and the slogan typeface is a free alternative to ITC Garamond, which Apple famously modified and adopted as a corporate font from 1984 to 2001 with the introduction of the iPod. (In fact, here's the very first iPod ad - which still used the old font!) This peculiar fake is just that - a fake! Because the Lixie was almost entirely consisting of CAD parts, a 3D model was already made. I've spent the last week building as close of a replica as I possibly could using Blender/Cycles rendering, which led to this result:

Now I can make videos with impossible angles and settings far beyond my video gear and budget - that are still completely representative of the real product! They can be on a table in 1986, (above) in bright daylight (left) or total darkness. (right) In fact, the header image for this log was also rendered!

Very Cheesy, But Somehow Extremely Cool

Shiny beveled titles, hyperspace travel, fast motorcycles, and neon grids. I've always been a huge fan of 1980s sci-fi and their enthusiastic cyberpunk futurism. This video starts out normal, but will become a deliberately over-the-top 80s sci-fi/action/tech commercial! Of course, it's still a work in progress, and more is to come!

I've just received some late parts from China, and the next Lixie batch will be ready in early August.