One of the last things we do before sending an Audio Bible out into the village, is to make sure it works and has a good charge. We want the units to be trouble free right from the beginning.
So we take the unit out of the factory packaging. We plug it into a wall charger, we charge it up. We turn on the unit, turn the volume to max, and make sure the unit works. Then we put some final assembly touches on it, repackage it, and send it off.
This helps us to weed out any factory failures, etc. (believe it or not we've had people claim they were broken because they hadn't turned the volume up.... so we do that).
This week's Jury rig has helped speed up how fast we can charge the units. Each unit takes 45 minutes to charge.
We originally had 10 wall chargers, with their wires dangling every which way.
There are 20 units in a box. So, each box would take a little under 2 hours to charge. That means every 45 minutes I get up from my desk, to go unplug 10 units, hunt for the wires, and plug in another 10.
I decided to dig up 10 more chargers. But then we had a mess of wires. So you would have to hunt for the little silver ends of the wires and then plug in the units. (in my dreams I'd have built a unit you could just slide the units into for charging, instead of hunting for cables and connecting them).
I decided we needed a way to organize the ends of the cables, so that we could quickly grab them. I hunted around and found a thin piece of plywood, then took my leatherman's and hand sawed a few notches and voila!
now the ends of the cables are super quick to find.
These two changes, easy and free, have drastically sped up how long it takes us to prepare Audibibles. And that's a good thing since the current order I'm working on is 400. Due by end of next week.
The thing about a good jury rig is:
-it should be cheap
-it should be fast
-it should fix the problem, while also identifying the need for a longer term solution.
Often a jury rig convinces someone 'hey this is a good idea' and then you have popular opinion behind you and can go and find a more permanent and better solution.
Getting things done, one day at a time.
