Lots has been happening on the Boldport front. There's 'cuttlefish', an educational board made for Embecosm; 'deadwood', a tribute to the cordwood PCB assembly from the 1960s, which will be sold by oomlaut as a kit!; 'logical', a board for PSHDL / Kasten Becker, which I'm late to deliver on; 'iron' and 'case', exciting secretive projects for an unnamed client; 'breakout', an engineer's emergency kit doubling as a business card; 'pease-cfch', a simplified ' pease' made for The Centre for Computing History that will be sold as kits; and, 'star', a simple experimental circuit for Star Simpson. These are the ongoing projects, and there are several exciting new ones in the concept stage.

If you've been following @boldport, you'd know that the application for YCombinator Winter 2014 funding was rejected. I was expecting that, but it was well worth a try. They do not provide feedback, so I can't tell what exactly they didn't like. If Boldport's story improves, and the situation's right maybe I'll apply for the next round. Against their recommendation, I neglected to save a local copy of my application; otherwise I would have published it here. The application video contains some things I'm not yet ready to talk about publicly.

I'm excited about CERN's investment in KiCad -- an inten developer for a year; I have a feeling that this is a significant step towards a robust open source CAD/EDA tools that can rival proprietary tools and their backwards ways. I'm particularly interested in how this will work out since I'm trying to pull something that hasn't really been successful before -- an open source engineering tool developed and maintained by a (profitable) commercial company. I find it hard to convince business types that this might actually work -- to be honest, I'm still convincing myself, and it might not work! -- because everything pulls towards the established closed-source model.

While we're on the topic of business, I'll mention PCBmodE's "donation" page. It's a way for you to support PCBmodE's development by buying something at an outrageously marked-up price. So if you like what we're trying to do, and find PCBmodE useful or interesting, please consider buying something.