LUMOS

My name is Frantisek and I want to tell you an interesting story about how one idea changed my life.

One fine day in 2012, my friend came to me with a box in his hands. He found its content next to some unnecessary stuff that had been thrown away. He gave me that box and told me: “Look what I found!” I was very curious what he was so thrilled about, so I opened the box. There were a couple of old vacuum tubes – nixie tubes – covered by dust. I took one of them out of the box and blew the dust away. Only then I could really take a glance of true beauty and elegance of this piece of history. “And what are you going to do with it?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. He showed me a webpage with instructions how to construct a nixie tube clock instead. I was so enchanted by this idea that I decided to construct my own nixie tube clock. The webpage with instructions was offering many interesting solutions. But I wasn’t quite sure with power supply. Along with another friend of mine we designed power supply that was small enough to squeeze into clock box. I wanted my new power supply to be a little bit more representative. That was the reason why I decided not to do printed circuit board myself. I contacted a local company and they were willing to produce 50 units at least. I thought to myself: “I need one printed circuit board, my friend another. That makes two.” But what should I do with the rest of it? “I’ll try to sell it. At least for my costs to return,” I shrugged my shoulders. I set the paper work going, created eBay and PayPal accounts. In short, I did everything necessary for market introduction. After some time passed, my wife told me she doubted I would sell one single piece of it. She didn’t say a word because she didn’t want to discourage me. I would like to thank her for that. In May 2012, I introduced my new power supply to market. I was thrilled to see whether my costs would be covered. Suddenly, my first purchase order was there. And then another one. And another one. For my big surprise, and even bigger surprise of my wife, all costs returned in few months. When the first series was gone, I got ready for the next one. It would be a shame to leave it like that. After a while I started to think about it again. “What could be next?”

And that’s how it all began.