CafeRadius

As some of you know, on Saturday April 1st the first beta test of CafeRadius was unleashed on a small cafe near my home in Seattle. Several weeks prior to this day, I met with the owner of the cafe and gave him a breakdown of the project. He seemed genuinely enthusiastic about it. Although his cafe was relatively new and still building a clientele, he was nice enough to allow me to test the device.

After nearly seven months of development and testing in my own computer lab, I was amazed at how many bugs and “kinks” you can find by testing in a real-world environment.

And the results of the test?
I couldn’t get it off the ground with the networking layout at the cafe. And adding customers to the database of allowed users was not convenient for the cashiers.

So what does this mean?
Certainly not failure. On the contrary, I took the whole experience as motivation to make it even easier to setup, configure, and more extensible on varying network layouts. I also must design an alternate method of adding customers to the user database as some cafes cannot / would not want to deal with the inconvenience of the current system.

In another few weeks I will have these ideas solidified and release another version of the CafeRadius device.