What came before: Garden Lights

The history of Hikari is incomplete without these garden lights. Although they have never become a staple product for us, what we did build was a starting point for our first proper products.

For more than thirty years, I have been designing and building electronic products - mostly for industrial use. The first twenty years of that time I was involved in every aspect of the product life from cencept to design, testing, production and even field service. The last twelve (before founding Bored Owl) were software focussed where I did little electronic design.

As founding the new business became a more concrete idea, I started to exercise my experience making electronic things.

In those previous experiences, making the mechanical components of a product was an area where more money and time was required (compared to the initial electronic design work). Tooling and testing 30 years ago was much more expensive and time consuming. At the time I entered the last twelve years, many of my designs were being molded from low cost poly-urethane resins in molds milled on a small CNC machine - things were beginning to change.

The garden lights (we dubbed “Phobos”) were an exercise in using the new 3D printing machines combined with a relatively simple circuit to make a lamp housing that could be reliably used outdoors.