During the flurry of craft shows before Christmas something came up that made me consider making stylus pens for touchscreen devices. I had seen the hardware before but never really thought much of it because I didn’t see the need for it.
This past fall though the square card reader came to Canada. The way that works is there is just a little card swiper that plugs into the headphone jack on your smart phone and allows you to take credit card payments using an app on the phone. One part of that process though involved having the customer sign their name on the screen of the phone.
It was one of the other vendors, who I was neighbours with for a while, who suggested that using a stylus would be more professional than just having them use their finger like we were doing. Since I make and sell pens it seemed like it would be in poor style to just purchase a generic stylus and ask customers to use it when they were purchasing a nice handmade pen.
With that thought I included some stylus tips in my next order of pen hardware and went about making some nice looking stylus’s.
I realized that if I replaced the end cap on some of my usual pens with the stylus tip then I had a nice combo of pen/stylus.
I could then use the end cap with another stylus tip to make a nice finished looking dedicated stylus.
It took me a bit of practise to get used to using the stylus. Basically I found that it works better using a bit more pressure than I initially wanted to use but now the next time I use my square reader to take a payment for a pen I will have a suitable stylus for the customer to use.
