About SANDL

Hi! We’re Stephen and Lisanne, the S and L of SANDL. We are both electrical engineers who met in university and have built a pretty fabulous life together ever since. The Printed Crib Board (PCB) has been a passion project of ours for far longer than we care to admit.

 

The Idea

We play a lot of crib. We also like to hike in the summer, and ski tour in the winter. During our outdoor adventures we like to discuss “million-dollar ideas”. Million-dollar ideas are random products/business ideas that we could develop, manufacture, and market. We’ve had many ideas over the years, some more viable than others. The Printed Crib Board is the only one that's ever come to life. 

Back in 2018, Stephen went fishing with his dad for a week. While on the boat they played a lot of crib but kept losing the scoring pegs. After that trip, the “electronic crib board” became the main topic of our adventure conversations – there were also many pegging jokes. It wasn’t long until we had a schematic and Stephen was spending his evenings and weekends laying out the board design. Our full time jobs and extracurricular hobbies made for VERY slow development.  

 

Development

Fast forward to December 2020, and we had a design we were happy with. We ordered 10 prototype boards from a custom printed circuit board manufacturer. It was a bit of a gamble as we didn’t know if the design would work, and the prototype boards were “not cheap”.

The boards arrived and we eagerly programmed them for testing, only to find out we reversed the LED’s on the board layout and EVERY. SINGLE. LED. WAS. BACKWARDS. That’s 363 tiny little LED’s we had to unsolder, reverse, and resolder by hand. Stephen got pretty fast at it after the first couple hundred.

Of the first 10 boards, we only got one working. However, that one was enough to prove the concept, finalize the programming, and do some beta testing with friends and family.

 

Global Crisis

What better time to launch a board game than during a global health crisis? One might assume that with all the additional time spent at home, we could have smoothly set up the entire business aspect of the project. However, the crisis introduced significant obstacles to our initial design. Owing to silicon supply shortages, the CPLDs (the central element in our original plan) experienced a price surge from $3 each to $750 each... and we needed three of them for every board. Our project became financially impractical. It was completely stalled. Thanks to the health crisis.

 

Re-Development

So we waited, how long could the pandemic really last? The cost of the CPLD’s HAS to come down eventually, right? RIGHT? We got busy with hobbies and job changes and shelved the project.

Fast forward to 2023, as much as Stephen wanted to program in VHDL, we decided to dust off the printed crib board (there was literally dust on it), and re-design using a microcontroller. We incorporated all the beta testing feedback, which proved to be incredibly valuable.

Funny enough, the most difficult component to select was the mounting feet. We had so many discussions and late nights spent scrolling DigiKey’s “rubber standoff” options. Please tell us how much you love the mounting feet 😉

Ordering 10 prototypes of rev 2 was much smoother. Although we had invested in a proper soldering station by then, the boards worked right out of the box! WOOHOOO!

 

Patent

Now we have a product that’s ready for manufacturing, we started to get serious about the business side of this project – enter Lisanne stage left. After talking with a very helpful Patent Agent it turns out we’re inventors and have a patentable invention! Wild.

We learned a lot about writing a patent. We also learned that it costs a boat load of money to file a patent. It will continue to cost boat loads of money until we are finished the “Examination” (which will take years), but we have filed and can launch the invention publicly using “Patent Pending”. Not a particularly exciting chapter in this story, but hopefully a valuable one.  

 

Branding

We’re stereotypical engineers, we are not known for our artistic and creative abilities. Coming up with a name for the product was easy. Printed Crib Board (PCB) is just a play on Printed Circuit Board, cause you know, our crib board is a printed circuit board. Sorry, this is what happens when engineers are in charge of marketing.

Branding was a bit outside of our ability and honestly outside of our interests. We worked with a fabulous local branding company to develop the PCB logo.

 

Our e-com experience

Our online store is still something we’re working on. We have so many questions. Every time I try to do something I get frustrated. Bear with us while we continuously build and improve this very basic template of a store.

 

What next?

First off, we need to put some effort into marketing. If anyone has ideas for tiktoks/reels we can use as social media ads please shoot me a message. 

Secondly, we are almost done developing a variation on our initial oval crib board to resemble the classic “29” crib board. Eventually, we would like to offer different coloured solder mask options as well.

Our focus in the short term is to source and sell alternative scoring buttons that use the on-board connectors. These buttons will help enable mobility impaired players to participate. We hope to have these available in our shop soon.

Our pending patent also includes games other than crib… but you’ll have to join our mailing list for more updates on future game boards!

We promise not to spam you, because honestly, who has time to write newsletters?!

 

Thanks for supporting our silly little passion project,

-Stephen and Lisanne

SANDL Electronics
349 Kislingbury Lane, Victoria, BC, Canad