It’s been a long time coming, but the prototypes are finally here and they work great! I need to work on my on-camera skills a bit, but this video captures the essense of what PSYNQ does, and how easy it is to use. 

I haven’t updated the blog in quite some time, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been working. 

After developing a successful proof of concept PSYNQ device, the project ground to a halt with minimal progress for a number of years. The parts list for the proof of concept device was too expensive, and the RF components being used were of questionable quality. I was discouraged, but still very much committed to bringing this product to life. 

After struggling to come up with a way around our difficulties for a number of years, a friend put me in contact with another engineer he thought could help. I set up a Zoom meeting and explained our product and how it worked. Almost immediately he had proposals for simpler and cheaper ways to accomplish the product objectives. 

Since then we have continued to move forward with PSYNQ product development and marketing plans. The plan is to launch our Indiegogo campain in the spring of 2024.

Stay tuned for upcoming details.

Was there already a product that solved this problem?

The search was on for a simple solution to our light switch problem. I had a lamp plugged into an outlet. I had a wall light switch I was used to using. I didn’t want to rewire the house. Surely someone had already solved this problem with simple product right? 

I searched and searched around online and came up with nothing. I went to a variety of stores and asked if they had something. Surely Bed Bath & Beyond already had this product, and I could use a coupon right? Wrong. I had some friends who thought they were good at using Google do some searching and they couldn’t find anything. I was starting to become convinced that this product wasn’t on the market yet.

I even took a dive down the ‘smart home’ rabbit hole and I’m still not sure if the smart home products would let you reconfigure a wall switch to control different outlets. You can definitely use your phone to control the power at an outlet, but this was for a room for our first baby. The last thing I wanted to worry about during 3am diaper changes was whether or not I had my phone with me. 

So then the next natural question was: how hard would it be to develop this product?

This all started about 6 years ago when my wife and I learned that we were expecting our first child. After procrastinating for as long as I could, we began the nesting process. Along with remodeling the bathroom, we also needed to set up a nursery for our incoming daughter.

This was a time of busy activity and anticipation. We picked out paint colors, bought a crib, and hung a decorative alphabet of hand crafted letters on the one wall. I also learned that my wife’s family has a tradition of having a rocking chair in the nursery to use for nursing and rocking the baby to sleep. We decided upon how we were going to arrange the furniture in our modest nursery and knew just where we wanted to put the rocking chair. My wife figured that the floor lamp would be positioned right next to the rocking chair in the corner opposite the door and next to a window. That’s when we discovered our problem. 

According to building codes, every room in a house either needs to have an overhead light controlled by a switch near the door, or a power outlet that is controlled by a switch near the door. Our new nursery had a switch controlled outlet near the door, but the lamp that would be the main source of light for the room was going to be about 12 feet away from the door. Running an extension cord across the room wasn’t going to be a practical solution. Unfortunately, our nursery was also a second story room with no access to the wiring from underneath. I wasn’t very enthused about the idea of crawling around in an attic that was full of blown insulation to fish new wires down to rewire our room. Plus, I knew we would probably want to rearrange the room again at some point in the future, so that would mean rewiring the room yet again.

There had to be a simpler way.