Nothing is official until...

You have a plaque. Thanks to John (who milled Matt's logo into a block of aluminum), the Open Source Hardware Bank now has an official tangible plaque, and it's now sitting on my desk. Maybe some day when the Bank replaces Citigroup and BofA, I can put this on the outside of the building as a signboard? Anyway, this also means that John can turn any image made in Powerpoint into a physical milled aluminum block - impressive!


Tomorrow morning, every single "Open Source Hardware Bank "reserve note" will be sent in the mail to each person who helped fund the first half of the Illuminato round, including me because I "bought-1, built-2" when the queue first opened (ok, actually I think I'll just keep mine and save the stamp).

Anyway, I've been meaning to buy a new color printer, so today I went down to J&R, and bought a printer to replace my old Laserjet (thanks HP for not updating the HP 1000 drivers to Vista and forcing me into an update, you've reminded me of why I'm doing OSHW to begin with!)

While I set up the printer, Matt unpacked and prepared the stationary for the notes, which I guess you could view as a fixed one-time cost of the bank:

My favorite purchase was the self-inking "Automatic Number Machine". It's like a Physical Computing auto-incrementor, except for stamps. Here's a picture of the mechanical advancing mechanism that somehow allows you to select the number you'd like to advance automatically:



What can I say, I was intruiged by the mechanism - especially the auto-re-inking platter which moves in and out from the side and underneath. I can imagine this thing taking more engineering than most cell phones:


I had this imagined in my head of a return to "classical banking" - for instance, in a Christmas Carol, or It's A Wonderful Life I always imagined those tellers or accountants with rubber stamps sealing check envelopes:

After the printer was set up, here's a picture of me signing the OSHW Bank Reserve Note, and stamping it with the auto-incrementor:

Finally, here's a picture of the whole desk set up, including John's OSHW Bank logo: