The "sidekick" was a passion project of mine before LLM hardware assistants became popular but emotional desk tamagotchi type desk and portable types of toys were starting to grow and mature. I tried to make an open hardware type of toy that tried to do all this and more.
The sidekick is a little toy that has feelings. A display with a face, an accelerometer that has a
The ultimate goal of this was to make a cool thing to sell at IndiaFOSS(at the Absurd Industries booth), but also act as a learning experience that taught me a teeny little about all the stages of making a small hardware product from planning, design, implementation to feature growth, marketing and impressionability. We made a lot of technical and non technical mistakes, mostly due to inexperience which may not happen
Somewhere along the line, I was unhappy with the value we were providing with box that just had a face: I started to add a programming system where micropython snippets pushed to the device flash could be executed live, reusing anything from the onboard accelerometer to buttons.
Scope creep started growing pretty badly around this time and as a solo dev(except a friend helping me with the case and a lot of friends helping me with tips, tricks, audits and 3d prints), the pressure quietly caught up to me, as I pretty much "vibeslopped" the codebase. By the time I realized the depth of the problem, the tech debt was too much to manage.
The talk also aims to cover the journey of how we started, registering a domain in excitement, developing PCBs for the first time in years at that point and more, to show how fun this process truly is!
