Call to the Interwebs: Looking for experts!

Most of the folks reading my blog are probably familiar with the high tech sex toy my partner Eve and I are working on. Essentially, we’re making a strap-on covered with sensors, that uses direct neural stimulation to allow the wearer to feel touch and pressure on the strap-on.

We’ve built several prototypes that validate the basic idea, and we’re excited to move into the next phase of development.

To that end, we need your help! We’re looking for two things:

1. A person skilled with molding silicone who is willing to work with us to do one-off and two-off custom castings that integrate sensors, electrodes, and electronics into the casting.

This person will know a great deal about custom-molding silicone and be willing to work with us with some fairly exotic requirements, like molding silicone with electrodes embedded in the surface.

2. A skilled electronics person with knowledge of RF analog electronics. I know digital electronics, and so far, the prototypes we’ve built have used electronics and firmware I’ve written. But I’m a bit rubbish with the electronics stuff. Specifically, what we need is someone who can design circuitry that can be controlled by an embedded microcontroller and can modulate the amplitude of an analog signal based on input from pressure sensors. Imagine a signal generator that produces a signal something like this:

What we’re looking for is someone who can design a circuit that will modulate the amplitude of this signal in proportion to the input from pressure sensors…but, naturally, the human body being what it is, the correspondence is logarithmic, not linear (hence a programmable microcontroller doing the work fo figuring out how strong the signal needs to be).

We do have a budget for accomplishing these tasks. It’s not a huge budget, mind you; we’re a small startup, and that’s how it goes with small startups.

If you are interested or know anyone who might be, please let me know! You can reach me at franklin (at) tacitpleasures (dot) com.

Want to keep up with developments? Here’s a handy list of blog posts about it:
First post
Update 1
Update 2
Update 3
Update 4
Update 5
Update 6
Update 7
Update 8