Silence for a month, then two updates in the same day?  Mike, what were you thinking???

Here's the 50,000ft view of the Beta design, and some of the reasons behind it.

Tim and I are very differant sizes and shapes, just like the rest of humanity.  My shape began very much stick-like and now is moving for more into the pear-shape than I'm happy with, and that got me thinking.  What would I do if either a)my waist keeps on expanding or b)I get my lazy gut in shape again?  With our current design I would need to build an entirely new set of hardware to accomodate me.  I'm WAY too cheap to do that.

Tim (in typical fashion) applied some common sense to the problem.

"Make the hardware reconfigurable." he says.

"How?" I ask.

Then he sighs and patiently points out where I'm overthinking the problem.  (Oh no!  Now they know our design process!  I've said too much!)

So it comes to this: The expensive potion of the belt is a 'buy once' item, and through the power and glory of modular design, the less expensive portion is removable, reconfigurable and replaceable with no tools beyond a simple screwdriver (and that won't even be necessary in the future).  No technical knowledge is required, and everything is marked.  No fiddling with wires, or any complicated proceedures.

I'll see if I can do a model of the system in something like sketchup and post it, or at least scan my crude drawings.  It's going to be chock-full of awsome sauce ladies and gentlemen.