Autumn is here and so are the colds!

Well once again it's long time no blog. Family life means that business is now pretty much restricted to business hours, apart from ebay enquiries that are still answered at all hours and over the weekends! Time as always is a precious and scarce thing, much more so now I'm actually a family man. One of the things currently eating at my time is illness, not the really bad kind, but man flu, sniffles and sore throats. You can work though them but they put a dampener on the day and mean you only do the bare minimum. I have to admit to dodging the phone when I'm feeling poorly which is never a good thing. A few words can turn an annoyed customer into an understanding customer and sort everything out. Note to self. Answer phone.

Now I'm struggling to find a point to this blog post, apart from the naval gazing introspection above.
I should probably tell you about the new products we have in. We've just listed a slew of new items on ebay. Mostly they are prewired LEDs a category now bursting with over 300 listings and there are more to come! Mainly in the likes of mix packs which are proving very popular.

In the next few weeks we're expecting more new stock, including a LED tester at long last!

This is just an artists impression but we can't wait to see the finished article for sale! (Quite sad I know but this is what makes us tick!)

Few and Far Between!

The blogs posted on here have become fewer and further between. What there has been of them has been fairly short and mainly talks about the actual blog rather than what we have been doing. Much like this one!

Well we have been working very hard, both for the business and in personal lives. A bathroom has been fitted and a kitchen is WIP. Scarlett is growing by the day, as I believe is customary for babies.

Previously the focus of the business has been to grow by expanding our product range and recently we've taken on Big Clive's excellent PCBs (Floodlight and Spotlight) There are a few other new bits and bobs on the site which are hopefully of interest, such as transistors, diodes and RGB colour changing LEDs.

On the whole I feel the site needs a good facelift, and it's on the to do list. Ebay listings need an overhaul too and VAT needs adding to all products.

We've decided though that rather than bringing in more and more products we'd like to sell the ones we already stock, but better and we're working on some tutorials and guides of what you can do with the LEDs, which should hopefully provide a little inspiration. We've made a place to put these all too, our forums. Please come along and say hi.

As a starter one of our customers has provided a guide for building a lit shelf for your PC using our SMD LED TAPE

Reproduced with Permission

So here's a basic guide to making one.

Step 1

12mm right angle cross section.

You can get lengths of the stuff from most DIY stores in aluminium or plastic. As this was not for strength, put simply to raise the floor, plastic was sufficient ( and far cheaper as i had to buy 2.8m of the stuff )

Simply cut to size with a Stanley knife, and in my case, spray the outside edge with black paint.

Step 2

Fix some of my favourite SMD led tape, available from [url=http://www.phenoptix.com/shop/smd-led-tape-c-25_40.html]here[/url], to the inside face.

Dead easy as it is self adhesive.

If you position the top of the tape 3mm from the top of the plastic cross section, then the 3mm acrylic floor will sit on it flush.

Step 3

After experimenting with different options, i found that a simple piece of white printer paper acts as a great diffuser for the light to even the spread out under the acrylic floor.

Step 4

Secure your cross section to the case, and the acrylic will rest on the SMD tape.

Step 5

Sit back and admire your work

Two Websites

We now have two fully functioning websites. The plan was to keep them both running for a month or so as we smooth out the service on the new site. However it will probably take a fair while for www.phenoptix.com to get the google ranking of the old site.

The new website already has more products than the old site, most of which can be found in the prewired LEDs category.

Come along and have a look, let us know what you think!

Mid July Blog

Another while between Blogs!

Partially down to impending parenthood meaning that more "spare" time has to be created for all those niggling jobs around the house and garden. The last significant niggling job being 25 meters of 6 foot fence panelling down one side of the garden!
Another "spare" time hog has been jolly old ebay who have insisted on "free" shipping on many listings. To enforce their policy they've cancelled a couple of hundred listings, which all need to be relisted with free (included!) shipping. I've also decided to add a bit more detail to some of them to save time answering the same questions over and over again. So relisting is taking up a fair chunk of time!

Plans for the phenoptix future will involve a new website as we've found our current provider to be pain for integrating credit cards. They also host us on an oversubscribed server in the US, meaning UK customers experience delays in service. We have complained but they deny the problem. Volusion, take note - We are not happy!
Along with the new website we will be relaunching our forums, but with more wholehearted support and a few features to draw people in.
That's just a potted view of where we are I suppose.
Thanks for reading!

First Blog O' The Month

The O' in the title is inspired by facebook adding an English (pirate) language setting to replace the English (UK) or English (US) option.
Blogs haven't been coming thick and fast from me of late as we are nicely busy with orders and too busy with all the other stuff. We've a couple of new projects on the go at the moment and the best of these is a new website we're hoping to launch this month. We'll run it in parallel with the existing site for a while before switching sites and redirecting all the traffic. Hopefully you'll all find it better, we think it'll be an improvement.
Anyway, end of another long day, time for bed.

Long time no blog - New Products on the website!

I feared this would happen from the outset. Packing orders and answering questions have for a while now taken up all available time. It's the weekend, Sunday in fact and I'm blogging after a morning of revamping the website.

This is what I've done of late:We've added a decent range extremely bright 10mm LEDs to the site which you can get to by clicking on the lolly pop looking LED above. We've started with Red, Green, Blue and White and there are also a number of less bright diffuse lens LEDs which I ordered in some years ago to cash in on the LED Throwie thing. I listed about half of the colours then ignored the 10mm LED category, leaving it a very ugly corner of the website.
We've added another 5 product lines, being warm white and orange LEDs in 3 and 5mm and our 5mm RGB LED. They can be found by clicking these little fellas:





There are a few more bits and bobs to come, we have an RGB superflux LED and also a UV superflux which can currently be found on ebay. They have been delayed in making it to phenoptix.com as our pricing scheme for the Superflux category needed a severe update.

We're Golden

At last we're back up to Gold Powerseller on ebay!
Many thanks for all your support and orders over the last 3 months!!

99.8%

of all our customers are nice, reasonable, sane and reply to emails. 0.2% it would seem are mean, unreasonable, questionable in the sanity department and rarely reply to emails - if ever. 0.2 % Bastards. The rest of you I love.

April Already!

The fourth month of the year is upon us already! It's been rather busy and this blog has been rather neglected. Also there is a small, actually large, amount of stock that is not yet for sale anywhere!!
There's some 1206 SMDs, Superflux LEDs in UV and RGB, tonnes of 10mm LEDs, some Bicolour and Tricolour LEDs in the old style that have been in stock for some years.
Just skimmed some interesting LED stories, that I thought I'd share.

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/led-lights/2009/03/site-update-led-based-performance-art.html

http://science.howstuffworks.com/led-incapacitator.htm

Sorry for the quick, dirty and unedited blog - but sommin is better than nothin.

Good Bye Italy

I've finally cracked! I've had it up to here (I'm holding my hand up above my head!) The Italian Postal Service are Thieves and due to their lack of ability to deliver my packages I have decided to stop sending to Italy.
Apologies to any existing customers, but only 1 in 3 packages gets to it's recipient in Italy. The usual procedure is that I send the items, I get an angry email 2 weeks later, then resend the items and then get a paypal dispute, which of course I lose as it is started as an item not received case. So all in all I lose 2 x the items ordered then the money initially paid.
This post is a rant but I've not posted for a while anyway.

Update: After the red mist cleared I did indeed continue shipping to Italy. Fortunately we have a new agreement with Royal Mail and we should be receiving compensation for every missing parcel.

Aston Martin

I broke a rule today, I usually go by no collections. I work from home and don't want to have people coming and going. At lunch time today I received a call from a very desperate sounding man, needing 90 Red LEDs today as their regular supplier had let them down. So with a man in need, I broke the rule.
He drove a hour to pick the LEDs up and only stopped for a short chat, but in this time he told me where the LEDs would end up, apparently they'd be in Geneva within 48 hours, taking pride of place in the rear lights of the Aston Martin Lagonda at the Geneva Motor show.
I think that's rather cool.

Norway

To everyone in Norway,
Please accept my sincerest apologies. It would seem in my haste to construct an excellent website to service the world's growing need for high quality, low cost LEDs - that resulted in www.phenoptix.co.uk - I forgot to add Norway to my list of countries that I ship to.
Unlike South Park, I do not blame Canada for this oversight, I blame Kenya.
A further apology for unleashing this song on any unsuspecting readers.

This oversight has been rectified. Norway I welcome you to phenoptix.

Regards,

Ben Gray

5 years on...

So 5 years ago I opened this account for blogging. Seems I didn't get around to it!
Well in the last 5 years a lot has changed, but writing about it all would no doubt take a fair bit of time. So lets concentrate on the now.
The part time pocket money project started at Exeter University is now a full time business. After some neglect our ebay store is back fighting fit and the feedback is clocking up nicely. The website is the next project. Our prices need a little adjustment and we've got loads of new stuff to list.
It's a very exciting time for me, a nervous one too considering the state of the world economy, but I'm expecting big things from phenoptix in 2009.