I had to make it hard on myself didn’t I?

I’d been building Sparkstation.live in stealth for months.

Software and hardware. Which is its own kind of problem.

Getting the software right is one thing, getting the hardware right is another, getting them to work nicely with each other reliably is a third problem on top of the first two.

The reason is I’d decided to make Sparkstation a blend of my software and homemade, retro hardware (consoles mainly, not computers). Yes, this is next-level ‘making’…

I probably shouldn’t have taken so much on for one of my first in-person product demo’s…but Create With gave me permission to demo it at their conference last week. I’d been teasing the idea to them for a while, so I had to see it through.

So it was the first outing for Sparkstation in the wild, and ugh, it was 37°C in Brighton on the day. The kind of heat UK infrastructure just isn’t built for. Luckily the venue had AC, even if everything else in town didn’t.

I ran Founder Mood Match, which is a simple game of matching (on web cam) a startup founder mood or vibe like “Co-founder disagreement”. AI judges your effort, and gives you a score. You get added to the day’s leaderboard. Just a bit of lighthearted fun at a tech event.

As if I wasn’t already sweating enough, the prototype broke early on in the day. Power save kept kicking in every time I stepped away from the stand – screen goes dark, console looks dead. Not helpful as people just walked on past, assuming it was just idle venue kit.

I’d put the machine in kiosk mode (a lockdown feature) for the demo, which meant I couldn’t just dig into Settings and turn power save off. So, it took a while to work out a fix in the hot, crowded room, but I ended up in the Terminal (which you can access in kiosk mode btw). I got it to fire a virtual mouse move every few seconds all day (to fool the power save into thinking someone was using it).

It worked. Slightly ugly, but it worked.

Lots of people tried it in the end, and many were intrigued by my glowing arcade game console. I learned a lot too, like where they got stuck, what didn’t make sense.

Some people I got talking to about what it could be, where it could go, things I hadn’t thought of. That part felt good, I always enjoy a bit of impromptu brainstorming on an idea, especially when you have something physical in front of you to discuss.

In all I have been blown away by the reaction, both at the event and everyone else I’ve pitched it to. So I’ve decided to get serious about this as a business concept.

If you’d like to try a demo online, just reply and let me know (you need a code to try them). If you know anyone who organises events, please forward this email to them.

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If you’re intrigued by the console, I’ll do another email about that another day. In short, it’s a box with an old 2014 Mac Mini running Ubuntu. It has an arcade button encoded into USB, and a rollerball as the tracker. Essentially it’s a big mouse, with the computer inside.