A year of MINI circuits …

Posted on by Ian C.

About a year ago, after making two MINI circuits for other people (and one for me) I decided to make a small batch of about 30 and sell them.

Since then, I have shipped over 600 auto-up-windows MINI circuits!
Orders increased slowly last year as word-of-mouth “advertising” enabled more people to find out about the circuit – and there was a big peak in orders when Gabe Bridgers MotoringFile reviewed it.

Since the new year, when I pushed up the price, orders have tailed off significantly – but that is OK since I was being overwhelmed sometimes last year! Maybe the increased price has put people off, or maybe I have now saturated my market.

Currently I have about 80 MINI circuits in stock – although I will be taking 11 to Las Vegas next week for Sin City MINI Club members; I expect the rest of my stock will run out by June.

3 thoughts on “A year of MINI circuits …”

  1. Ian, what processor do you use for the MINI circuit? I’m an engineering student with a CR/W MCS on order that I’ll receive in early April (even though I ordered at almost the same time you ordered GBMINI #3, sigh) and I’d like to explore some of the other possibilities with the vehicle bus interfaces… especially in the areas of text display on the radio and performance data capture. I’d rather not reinvent the wheel as far as board design if I can help it!

  2. Ben,
    The MINI circuit is built around a PIC16F819. But it does not connect to any of the MINI busses – only to the individual switch signals to/from the toggle switch panel.
    You might also want to look at my HKenabler which uses a Motorola HC08 part and communicates on the iBus (see Hacking the iBus)

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