Nightswimming

January 31st, 2012

Oh man. I wrote this poem in a 5am couch request to someone in Oklahoma City, and now I’m all in love with it.  Quick!  Publish it before I decide that it’s lame!

They say abandoned swimming pools
are just for drunks and teenaged fools
An eyesore, trainwreck, waste of space
drained pimples on our city's face.
But I say nothing, simply mourn
that these pools are so damn forlorn.
Once filled with screaming multitudes
Summer pals and moonlit nudes
Weekend heartbreak lifeguard's chair
Sunlight streaming on a pair.
Whistle out when lightning sounds
Barbequeues and beer abound.
The pool's endured throughout the years
bare splayed footsteps; toddler's tears.
But now it lies, dark drained and streaked
Dirt lying where lovers sneaked.
It's sentiment for seasons past
that brought me towards tonight's repast.
Wicker basket, tennis shoes
black shirt dark hat jeans: dark blue.
Hop a fence and walk alone
darkened paths where moonlight shone.
Down the ladder, gently pick,
to share with this pool a pic-a-nic.
Care for some wine?  I'd like some too!
What pleasure it is to dine with you.
To see old friends from times long past
Forgotten; the world moves so fast.
But I won't let you lie alone
I'll sit upon your lifeguard's throne.
Whistles, laughter bring back good times
White lips turned black with red wine.
We're both casualties of some mindless putz
progress, age and budget cuts.
But tonight is ours to share
we feast on cheese and balsam pears
Let's make some noise, let's get retarded
reMIND this city what it's discarded!
Hurled cabernet on shower rooms
fly high a flag to show the moon.
Stereo and switch to beer
slipstep falling on my rear.
Howl at the moon, curse at the sky
we're all that remember, you and I
A tragedy; you know it's true...
OK, officer, I'll come with you.

 

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midnight designs

January 15th, 2012

There’s a time when it’s 12:45 in the morning, you’re sitting in a bar somewhere on the pacific coast, and you’re getting introspective.  You worry that you haven’t sold enough printed parts for the day, that people gave you too many drinks and not enough cash, and that you’re batting out of your league.  You look over at your friends, exhausted from a long day, and you wish you could say something great.  No words come, but your hands start moving of their own accord; they open your laptop, fire up Inventor, call up pages on the internet, trace vectors and convert formats.  And in the pounding bass from the bar, in the dim lighting and the reflections of the patio fire, something pops up on your screen.  Something great.  Something that gives you hope for the future.

Batman knuckles 2

Batman brass knuckles.  Designed at 12:46 in the morning for Sarms Jabra.  The initials are backwards so that when you punch someone, it leaves the imprint of your initials in their skin.  We were looking for a killer app for 3D printers.  We found this instead.

Batman knuckles 1

Yes.  Everything will be OK.

First post!

January 12th, 2012

Well, we shipped our first orders today.  Our first product was a customized iphone case, printed, boxed and shipped at a bleary 5:30 am.  But it’s exciting!  We’re on our way!

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And the photo of the day is…

December 9th, 2011

…also from the most picturesque burned-out roadside porn store I’ve ever seen IMG 0355

self-portrait of the artist in a burned-out roadside porn store in the heartland of america

December 9th, 2011

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Occupy 4S

November 25th, 2011

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I was walking in Central Hong Kong today[~11/13/11], and on an elevated walkway, I saw a huge crowd camped out behind police barricades.  TV cameras were everywhere, gangs of cops were talking into walkie talkies, and Central looked more trashed than I’d ever seen it.  Thousands and thousands of people were milling about, the walkway was full of trash and tents and people sleeping on the street.  For a moment, I thought I’d walked into an Occupy protest.

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Nope!  A couple thousand people were camping out for the launch of the iPhone 4S.  The iPhone isn’t due to launch for two more days, and people already started camping out the night before, waiting in line to get an iPhone.  Walking around, it felt a little like an insanely great version of the United Nations.  Pakistanis, Chinese, Hong Kongers, Indians, Filipinas–people were coming in droves, sleeping in the street and waiting for their iPhone.  But why?  It’s just a phone.  Could it possibly be worth spending a couple days crammed in a noisy Hong Kong sidewalk?

As it turns out, it’s absolutely worth it.  These weren’t the apple fans who we see waiting in line at the San Francisco or New York stores.  Everyone I talked to had one thing in common:  they were going to resell their phone.  The new iPhones are going for around US$750, and the various people I spoke to were sure that they could resell them for a $120 profit.  Apple imposes a limit of two iPhones per person, but that’s a tidy 17% profit in two days. Everybody waiting in this line knows that the world wants iPhones, and they’re not about to let this opportunity slip away.

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Ladybugbot en masse

November 10th, 2011

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So I made my first Ladybugbot and it worked pretty well.  The next step was to make ten of them, and I wanted the new ones to be easy to make and reliable.  After playing with the ladybugbot for a bit, I came up with a list of features and design specs.

++  Assembly needs to be snap-together.  This will speed everything up and improve the reliability of my vibrating motor mounts (hot glue gets all over the place and has a lot of variability in how well it holds the motor and transfers vibrations).  I also noticed that one of my motors got hot and melted the hot glue, which promptly gunked up the motor shaft.  No more hot glue.

++  I need to make my own circuitry.  I’m using circuitry ripped from a junk DeskPet right now, but it costs ~$15 for a legitimate, off the shelf Deskpet, and that will not abide, man.  I’d also like to make it do more than be a R/C toy.

++  I’d like to have high product throughput.  It takes about an hour to print out the casing and ~15 minutes to rip out a Deskpet’s guts, cut up some toothbrush heads, solder in my electronics and hot glue everything in place.  I’d like to speed up the assembly time, and if I could get better than a product every hour, that would be ideal.

++  I need good yield.  I’m getting a ~88% yield coming out of my makerbot

++  It should be cheap.  Fancy angled toothbrushes cost $4 each.   That and the electronics are the biggest cost driver in the ‘bot right now.  I should be able to print my bristle heads.

 

Here’s the current Ladbybugbot Cost of Good Sold (COGS).  I’m placing ABS cost at $50/KG and makerbot time at $1/hour (it costs ~$1000, will last for ~1000 hours and doesn’t cost much to operate).

1x Deskpet electronics (circuit board and battery):  $15

2x Toothbrushes @$4/ea:  $8 total

2x Vibrating motors, taken from little toys @$2/ea:  $4 total

1x casing (~1:30 hour print time, 30g plastic):  $3 total

assembly:  15 minutes (not valued, like a sucker)

assembly materials (hot glue, solder, etc):  $0.10

1x box and packing materials:  $.20

total:  $30.3

 

Well, this is pretty high, but there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit here.  The deskpet electronics are an obvious start, and the toothbrushes.  If I can print the toothbrushes for $1, I can drop $7 from the COGS, and if I can make my own boards for ~$5, that’s another $10.  I found vibrating motors on Alibaba for $.50 each, dropping $3 off the price.  I bet I can get 30 minutes off the print time, saving another $.5, and that’s pretty good for a first pass, bringing the COGS down to a (theoretical) $9.80.

If I factor in my ~87% printer yields, every failed print costs me ~$3, so I have to distribute that cost across the ‘bots I can sell, adding $.38 to the cost of every bot.

I’d like to be making ~$5 off each bot I sell, meaning that this ‘bot, sold through a distributor, is probably coming in around ~$20 after the first pass of cost-savings.  I’d like to drop that by $5-$10.

So, here’s the BOM I’m shooting for after the next redesign/sourcing effort

1x electronics kit:  $5

2x printed bristles @$.5/ea :  $1 total

2x Vibrating motors, sourced from alibaba @$.50/ea:  $1 total

1x casing (~1:00 hour print time, 25g plastic):  $2.25 total

assembly:  5 minutes (not valued, like a sucker)

1x box and packing materials:  $.20

total:  $9.45

One of the nice things about Hong Kong is that a design iteration takes a day.  I can get circuit boards made in 8 hours, pick up parts from an electronics distributor in the city, and print a couple test ‘bots while I’m out getting all the other stuff.  I can send out a new design in the morning and be testing it by evening.
So I got to working.  I put together my first circuit design and picked up parts
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It worked like crap–it was very insensitive to light, I couldn’t find a fitting surface mount pot in hong kong to save my life, and the vibrations would pop the motor solder joints loose in record time.  I designed and breadboarded a simpler version of the electronics, and then fired up eagle and designed the next iteration of the board.

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In the meantime, I tweaked the ‘bot mechanical design so the motors would snap in.  I went through an iteration trying to make a snap holder for a circuit board and found that it didn’t print well.  I also experimented a lot with integrating bristles into the printed case design, rather than buying toothbrushes, or even printing bristles separately.  I also went through a couple iterations figuring out ways to hold the circuit board in place.  After eleven iterations of the design, I finally got to a design that worked half decently.
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It took me about 25 design and prototyping-hours and about $150 to get to a (ugh, mostly) stable circuit board, bill of materials and mechanical design.  That’s astoudingly fast and cheap for a product, but it could be infinitely better.  Looking back at my progress through the design cycle, I had very steady progress from my first through third prototypes.  Each iteration took about an hour.  After my third prototype, I started designing my own custom circuitry.  I think this  is where I went wrong.  Let me explain:

Low-cost 3D printers are a powerful tool, and mine played a central role in the development of this ‘bot.  After my third iteration, I switched from using the rapid-prototyping tools that I had ready access to and built with a mix of rapid-prototyping services in the area, parts from catalogs and my own rapid-prototyping tools.  Suddenly, my iteration time and cost skyrocketed.  On an absolute scale, it wasn’t a lot–any product engineer will tell you that iterating a hardware design in a day for $50 is amazing.  Still, though, I was suddenly going through iteration upon iteration without much to show for it.  I’d reuse the electronics from my first prototype in ten different prototypes, pulling the electronics out of one and swapping it into another.

The reason I was able to get initial results so quickly is that I was able to use commodity electronics–someone else’s cost-optimized design that already did most of what I wanted.  In this case, I used a $.75 circuit board from a low-cost toy.  The board had a rechargeable battery, IR receiver, could receive commands from a remote controller, had a small microcontroller to control everything, and could turn two motors off and on.  I’m sure it took hundreds of man-hours to perfect the design and production of the remote control electronics that I used.  Of course, I could create a custom board to fit my design, and sure–there are some things I’d like my ‘bots to do, but that I can’t do with these off-the-shelf boards (sense the surroundings, communicate with other bots).  Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way, though–I’m setting an arbitrary design and doing a lot of custom engineering to create something that fits that design.  Why not take a more opportunistic approach and base my design around low-cost, commodity electronics than I can get my hands on?  Bristlebots are a great example–all I need to make a new robot design is a mechanical shape to hold everything in place and form bristles to propel the ‘bot.  Add my own vibrating motors and the electronics from a $1.60 commodity R/C car and I’ve got a radio-controlled bristlebot.

I don’t think it’s very interesting to just 3D print more plastic shells for commodity products, but it’s interesting to use mass-produced goods as lego-like building blocks to make other more interesting products.  It’s not always a perfect fit, but I believe that there’s a lot of clever new designs we can make by building off of other low-cost products.    I’m scratching around the tip of something that I believe is very powerful, very interesting, and very big, but exactly what that something is will be a topic for another blog post.

 

Until then, here’s a sexy naked picture of some ladybugbots:

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the $50 swarm

October 28th, 2011

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So, I built my first ladybugbot last night.  It costs me about $5 US to build one–~$.50 each for the motors, $1 each for the toothbrushes, $1 for the plastic/makerbot time, and the electronics are ‘free’, since I’m cannibalizing them, but I happen to know their factory cost is $.75.  It takes me about 15 minutes to solder and hot glue each one.

For a cute little robot that can scoot around my floor, this is pretty good.  Right now, though, it’s nothing more than a cute, R/C toy.  I’d like to do something more.

First of all, it bugged me that I had to do 15 minutes of assembly per bot, and that I had to print out a top and a bottom, a la last night’s design, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:12975.  So, I made a single piece design that would print in 45 minutes, and should only take 5 minutes to assemble.  Here’s my v3 design on thingiverse:  http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:13004

So I started thinking about what a bunch of cute, cheap bots could do, and what I could put together in a day of soldering.  I knew that I could get CDS cells in Sham Shui Po, here in hong kong, so I thought I could make some ‘bots with like seeking/fearing behavior.  Wouldn’t it be cool to have a little swarm of bots that freak out and hide under the furniture when you turn on the light?  Or a solar powered bot that seeks out light?  This isn’t anything that BEAM roboticists haven’t done a million times before, but hey–everyone should have their own swarm, right?  In the future (I’m designing the board now), I can put a small AVR on board so I can start programming more interesting behavior.

So today, I fired up the makerbot and started cranking out the next iteration of bots.  For the first time, I tried the gcode copy-and-paste trick to make a bunch of objects in series using the automated build platform.  It was pretty good–I got 5/6 shells and one ugly plastic blob.  By the end of the afternoon, I had eight shells–my goal was 10 $5 ‘bots in the swarm, and I was feeling pretty good.

I started thinking a bit more about a simple little light chasing circuit, so I made this one with a dual comparator, some CDS cells, and two NFETS to drive the motors.  There’s nothing novel here–this is right out of what the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain, but it’s fast and cheap, and that’s all I care about.  Video of the build coming tomorrow.

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The bristlebot invasion

October 27th, 2011

Well, I’m wicked proud of this ‘bot. Dig it:

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6096/6286769352_73bb52fb43.jpg

This cute little bristle bot is about 2″ large, costs ~$5 to make, and I’m amazed at how well it zips around my kitchen floor.  It’s just two vibrating motors, two toothbrush heads, and a remote control pulled out of another robo-toy.  I really want to see a little swarm of these guys with a little bit of intelligence, even if it’s just light-seeking or light-fearing.

I prototyped this guy in four days in hong kong, starting from scratch with my first bristlebot:

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6040/6276964540_842c06b9b4.jpg

Then moving on to an R/C, steerable ‘bot made entirely out of mangled toothbrushes and hot glue

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And then moving on up to 3D printed bodies.  Square bodies don’t work so well, because the robot can only drive forward and turn, so it gets stuck.  My third iteration is the circular ladybugbot

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6235/6280297575_9e1dec0953.jpg

 

Here’s some video of the ladybugbot being adorable:

So, that’s the ladybugbot.  It’s stunningly cheap and fast to build–the motors are fifty cents each, the bodies take about an hour to print out, and my latest and greatest prints come out of the makerbot complete with bristles and snap-mounts for the motors.  I’d like to end up with some $5 ‘bots that have some smarts–enough to do basic communication and navigation. The future is coming, and it’s small, round, and pink!

If you like it, make one for yourself!  You can use pretty much any vibrating motors you can get your hands on–I’ve been ripping mine out of cheap little vibrating toys, but there’s lots on ebay, in junk stores, and on hobbyist electronics sites like seeedstudios.com

I ripped the electronics out of a deskpet (http://www.mydeskpets.com/) to make my remote controller, and that gave me a cheap remote, motor controller and battery.

The 3D printed files are all up on thingiverse here:  http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:12975

And the toothbrushes you can get at your preferred toothbrush retail location.  Hold everything together with some dabs of hot glue, and away you go.  If you make one or improve on it, let me know–I’d love to see more little pink robots in the world.

Blisters and Moleskines, take 2

October 3rd, 2011

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photo credit:  Flickr usr bluman

I don’t like the last thing I wrote on Moleskine, don’t like it one bit.  There’s no moral to the story, just a grumpy old man kvetching about how he can’t get his favorite esoteric notebooks.  It’s time for a do-over.

 

Moleskine is giving us a glimpse of the future, a glimpse of what products and production and stock shelves will look like when it’s drop-dead-simple to make a new product.  The magic of Moleskine is in the production–they have a set of machines that can literally make anything within a certain class of product.

Take a look at this moleskin-esque notebook supplier in Guangzhou:  They have a production line that can make just about any style of notebook, and they specialize in custom orders and low volume production.  A notebook costs $.5, and they have a minimum order of 1000 notebooks.

http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/448946289/OEM_high_quality_hardcover_notebook.html

So, with production like this, it costs $500 to go from a design to production.  They deliver seven days after you pay them.  That’s insanely accessible.  The barrier to entry is so low, it can’t even really be considered a barrier.  It takes far more  money and time to design the product than it does to bring it into production, but even the design effort isn’t a big deal.  If you’re a company like Moleskine, that has a brand and a way (web stores, retail shelves, etc) to put new products in front of people, why not experiment with a lot of new products?  The cost of designing, of experimenting, of trying out a new idea is so low (and Moleskine’s ~1000% profit margins on their $16 dollar notebooks are so high), that even if a new product sells terribly, it’ll probably break even.

What’s interesting here is that Moleskine’s retail presentation hasn’t caught up with the flexibility of its production.  They have 400 products that they’re actively selling, but you haven’t heard of most of them.  Their store shelves have no advertising, no way of telling consumers about a new product.  They just have an undifferentiated pile of products on a shelf.  Who knows, maybe that’s enough.  The bottom line, though, is that Moleskine is a business where the bottleneck isn’t the design or the production, and Moleskine is pushing it for all it’s worth, cranking out new, different products at a mind-boggling rate.

I have mixed emotions when I look at the Moleskine shelf.  On one hand, I see a pile of exceedingly similar products, where the product I love is buried somewhere in a pile of shit I don’t care about.  One the other hand, I see a product meritocracy; a world where the barrier to entry for a new product is almost nil, and it’s so easy and cheap to try out a new idea that it happens all the time.  Where the products people love rise to the top and the others fall to the wayside.  Where sales aren’t correlated to advertising efforts, but to the utility of the product.  The low barrier to entry does for journals what online blogging did for publishing–it’s cheap, it’s easy, and anyone who cares can contribute and get ideas out into the world.  There’s one thing the Moleskine shelf lacks, though, and that’s a way to search for the product you want in a field of similar, but inferior products.  It needs a search engine.

 

My Moleskine craze has just begun.  More on Moleskines soon.

 

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photo credit:  flickr usr flyingturtle