I supposed it's possible, if someone wanted to spend hours and hours and hours trying to crack the code on the chip. The beautiful thing about how this is put together is the methods in place that making the "cracking" of the code fairly difficult. I am a professional network engineer by trade so I know that you can reverse engineer anything... it's making that reverse engineering so difficult that it's not worth the time or trouble.
Can it be done? yeah, probably. would it be worth the months of effort it would take to do it? no, probably not. It's impossible to make something "uncrackable" - it is, however, possible to make it so time consuming and difficult that it's just not worth the effort.
I'm not really that interested in becoming a millionaire off of one device like this, but it would be a great starting device that might lead to newer and different devices. All along, the thought has been to sell a base unit that has all the functinality that I mentioned in my first post and then to make add-on modules or devices to make the unit expandable for a more customized look or a more functions. We'll see how it goes.
This won't be the first electronic device I've brought to market and I'm sure it won't be the last. Who knows, it may end up getting sold to a larger manufacturer - I've done that before as well.
As an update, I'm working with a company now to make a membrane switch unit to go with the display. the goal is to ensure that the switches are waterproof, has at least two different light colors, and run on low voltage.
I am also beginning work on the graphical LCD display instead of the basic 2 lines of text that the unit has now. I think I am gong to be able to make this change without affecting the units price. This would allow the unit to display each devices full name and state instead of just the first letter of the device. I am also considering having the display show a graph of temperatures at the bottom of the unit. this would allow the user to monitor temperature trends over a period of time (day, week, month) - which I can see would be important to those that have temperature sensitive life in the tank such as anemonies and most corals.
I started thinkin about this graph because I know that my tank cools off quite a bit at night. In fact, I think I have a temperature swing of 4-7 degrees, but unless I get up in the middle of the night to check it, I won't know.
The final thing I am looking at doing it adding a water level monitor to the unit so that the user can track evaporation - this may lead to an auto top off add-on...
Right now I am trying to concentrate on getting the main unit to market, but that requires me to think about all the things I want to add on, so that those ports are available in the future, even if the code isn't written just yet. With that being said, the first "test" units that will be available shortly will not have these special ports on them since the boards are being cut without them. the final production units will have them.
Lots of features rattling around in my head that I want to add. The great thing is that I have the headroom in the processor to perform lots of cool functions and my code space isn't really limited...
As soon as I have the Graphic LCD running, I will post a photo of it. Keep in mind that it will be pretty small - I am trying to keep the footprint small.
