All I'm gonna say is that the image below is one of three that support patent EP1140526 B1.
Manufacturing guy-at-large.
Patents are insane.
I got sucked in a little today looking at Google Patents. It's really cool to find a design and then look at all the patents filed by the designer. Weirder still if the company is one that makes a product you hold in high regard, viz. LH Thomson, the contract machine shop and venerable manufacturer of bicycle hardware.
On the one hand, Thomson owns an incredibly broad patent for "Object clamp, such as for bicycle component, having at least one relief area and related methods." This would appear to cover not only any split tube clamp, including those on bicycle stems & seatpost clamps (as the patent describes), but also almost any accessory that attaches to a tube, anywhere (disclaimer: I am not an expert in patent law). See fig. 33, below:
If I'm reading this correctly, it's saying that if your split tube clamp has one bore which is of a slightly larger diameter than the diameter of the part you're clamping to, your part is covered by Thomson's patent - at least until 2021, which (I believe) is when it runs out.
On the other, Thomson owns a patent for "Bicycle rider hand attachment and cooperating gear shift actuator and associated methods" that is batshit crazy. The basic idea is that of a gripshifter, but Thomson's version requires the user to wear one of many medieval glove-like contraptions, which interface with the shifter itself. See fig. 15, below:
It should be noted that this is exactly as crazy as it looks - disjointed thumb and all. Or see fig. 6, which installs a shaft onto the rider's hand, to interface with some handlebar-mounted shifting device:
So yeah, anyway: Patents are insane. Are these inventions useful? Are they worth protecting? Is the value of their protection greater - to either LH Thomson or the greater society at large - than the value of open sourcing them? I don't claim to have an answer, but I would be interested to hear arguments for the pro side - it seems a bit specious.
Paul Graham on Formidibility
Anyone who's randomly reading my blog and doesn't know Paul Graham should just stop now. His subject matter is both focussed and applicable to a wide variety of situations; his ideas are poignant; and his manner of presentation is perfectly tailored. From his "How to Convince Investors" piece, posted 2013.08 (emphasis mine):
The most important ingredient is formidable founders. Most investors decide in the first few minutes whether you seem like a winner or a loser, and once their opinion is set it's hard to change. Every startup has reasons both to invest and not to invest. If investors think you're a winner they focus on the former, and if not they focus on the latter.
...
There is a role for ideas of course. They're fuel for the fire that starts with liking the founders. Once investors like you, you'll see them reaching for ideas: they'll be saying "yes, and you could also do x." (Whereas when they don't like you, they'll be saying "but what about x?")
But the foundation of convincing investors is to seem formidable, and since this isn't a word most people use in conversation much, I should explain what it means. A formidable person is one who seems like they'll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way. Formidable is close to confident, except that someone could be confident and mistaken. Formidable is roughly justifiably confident.
There are a handful of people who are really good at seeming formidable—some because they actually are very formidable and just let it show, and others because they are more or less con artists. But most founders, including many who will go on to start very successful companies, are not that good at seeming formidable the first time they try fundraising. What should they do?
What they should not do is try to imitate the swagger of more experienced founders. Investors are not always that good at judging technology, but they're good at judging confidence. If you try to act like something you're not, you'll just end up in an uncanny valley. You'll depart from sincere, but never arrive at convincing.
LH Thomson
Pretty cool diagram. From EP0842083 B1, filed 1996.07.30.
Somebody's weird idea.
Found in a Google Patents search today. This is, for anyone counting, patent no. US2013014116A1, filed just a month or so ago by someone named Mu-Rong Li.
Five Whys: TCD
In 2006, I had just graduated from college and was making a decent income doing construction management in Northern California. But I was socially isolated and looking for something to occupy a particular part of my energy, and so began accumulating the skills, knowledge and tooling required to build bicycle frames.
When the renovation I was working on was completed, I felt a desperate need for change. I moved back East and tried, for three years, to build a framebuilding business. It was a formative part of my career, but in the end I left it behind me. Although it has remained a fond period of my life, I have struggled to integrate the lessons I learned from it into my life - and to understand the many lessons I never learned in the first place.
In an effort to accelerate and document my struggles, I've been wanting to perform a Five Whys postmortem on my short lived career as a framebuilder. I choose the Five Whys method not because I think it's the most effective, but because it's an interesting format, and one that I hope will constrain and guide my explorations - which otherwise might tend to ramble - a bit. A disclaimer: I'm new to this method, so stick with me a little.
Round one.
My framebuilding business failed. Why?
Because I gave up on it.
Why?
Because I was offered a position doing work that I considered more engaging, interesting and lucrative.
Why?
Because I had put myself in a position in which I was moderately qualified for a position setting up a prototyping shop for a small- to mid-sized company that was not expert in prototyping mechanical assemblies, and I happened (by pure luck and fortitude) to be related to two key people who ran such a company.
Why?
Because my primary interest in building my business was to develop effective methods of developing and producing interesting products, and I had organized my business to optimize my ability to do so.
Why?
Because I wanted to be compensated for my ability to analyze problems and come up with effective solutions to them, and I wanted my medium to be physical products. And the prototyping and short-run production oriented machine shop that I built for my business fit those goals nicely.
Round Two.
I gave up on my framebuilding business. Why?
Because I misunderstood, on a basic level, the degree to which my professional interests would be fulfilled by a career building custom bicycle frames.
Why?
My experience working on bikes in college was collaborative (I co-managed a nonprofit cooperative bike shop), and gave me an incredible opportunity to solve problems (I started working there at a highly transitional time in the business, which had slipped, in many ways, into organizational chaos). I cared deeply about the entity - both as a business and as a social venue - and I conflated my enjoyment of these two things into one.
Why?
I think the implicit assumption I was making was that I was starting a brand that would be cool, and that cool people would be drawn to it and want to work with me.
Why?
Because I was naive? I suppose the better question here is: Why weren't they drawn to me? The answer is largely that I wasn't proactive about getting my message out there - I wasn't writing, barely had a website, and didn't like hanging out in bike shops or with many bike people.
Why?
A lot of it was insecurity, no doubt. I had this idea that I wanted to be putting out a product that was fully baked, and I kept waiting for the day where I thought that what I was doing was good enough to pimp in a real way. That day eventually came, but not until I had exhausted my ability/willingness to stick through it alone, not to mention my desire to continue financing my career on debt.
Round three.
On at least a few levels, I didn't get what I wanted out of my framebuilding career. Why?
There are a bunch of ways to answer that question, but the most prescient approach would seem to be one that considers the present state of my career. I am, by any reasonable definition, unemployed; and yet it's likely that I'm happier with the state and direction of my life than I have been since (at least) I left college. At the same time, I can't help but feel that I didn't make the most of my time, money, and efforts between 2008 and 2011 (the period of time where framebuilding was my sole occupation).
Why?
Well, the money I spent during that period is kind of inexcusable. I was - and remain - fond of referring to it as "my MBA," and it did teach me a lot about running a small business. But the truth of it is that I could have been much more focussed on what I wanted to learn. I made only small pivots during that three year period. Mostly, I struggled through the hardships that I was putting myself through - an experience I hope not to repeat.
Why?
I struggled through it because I didn't know what else to do. And because I had a particular idea of myself and my career goals.
Why?
Because I was short sighted, and wasn't capable of taking a long-term/objective oriented view of my life.
Why?
Because despite my deep belief in big things like happiness, reason and critical thinking, I couldn't see past the things that I had romanticized for so many years: design, physical product, and the value of engaging in an industry that is believed - by some, at least - to be environmentally friendly.
Roundup.
Well, I'm not totally sure what that tells me - or you, dear reader. I look back at myself during those years as being unreasonably idealistic (it's likely I inflate my idealism, FWIW), but most importantly I held basic misunderstandings about what it is that I value. I'm sure many of these persist (I've become fond, recently, of telling near-strangers that "my career is way existential these days"), and I accept them for what they are - a basic quality of the human condition. At the same time, I hope and try to enrich my understanding of what it is that makes me happiest, and when I find that thing, I do not plan on struggling with some romantic notion of craftsmanship in lieu of pursuing it.
Feature Requirements: Parts Storage System
Parts storage has been a key aspect of my product development career, and has consistently frustrated me. A few reasons for my ire:
- Parts cabinets are expensive. I probably spent $200 on my cabinets, which were mostly used; at my last employer, we spent over $2K on "standard duty" parts drawers, shown here, from McMaster-Carr.
- Traditional parts organizers are time consuming to organize, and often aren't formatted to hold the size and quantity of parts you need to store.
- Most management systems don't allow for reorganization without significant amounts of work.
- Every organization & labeling system I'm aware of is disconnected from the part specs that I usually want to have on-hand when making a selection from physical inventory.
- Keeping a digital catalog of parts inventory on-hand is time consuming, difficult, and totally disconnected from the location and quantity of the parts themselves.
In order for the full implications of digital product development, manufacturing and distribution to come to pass, I believe that industry will need to completely rethink how it addresses, organizes, processes and tracks parts inventory. I have a few ideas of what this will look like, but I'd like for now to focus on the requirements for such a system.
- Parts should be uniquely addressable. For many of my applications, McMaster-Carr, DigiKey, Sparkfun, and Amazon product numbers would be fine. Ultimately a system like IP would probably be preferable, if only to apply uniformity and allow manufacturers and distributors of all flavors to buy into a single standard. At some point, I wonder about the possibility of addressing not only each brand/make/spec of bolt, resistor, or chip - but also addressing each physical instance of each of those categories. With the enormous addressing capacity of IPv6, this is well within the realm of possibility - we simply need to find an appropriate tracking mechanism. (Side note: IPv6 has an addressing capacity of about 3.4*10^38. In comparison, there are estimated to be on the order of 7.5*10^18 grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. That's a ratio of 4.5*10^19 : 1, in favor of IPv6 addresses.)
- Physical organization shouldn't need to be hierarchical. Hierarchical systems work fine on dynamic interfaces (e.g. on the web, where they're used in conjunction with tagging and search features), but parts organization is subject to so many other forces - not the least of which is the size and quantity of a given type of item. For example: if the bolts I have on hand vary in length from 5mm to 50mm, finding a single drawer to accommodate all of them will be difficult. Much better to allow locational organization to be loose, and instead encourage browsing through a database. Put a different way: I don't see the need to institute a browsable Dewey Decimal system on my parts; I'll just search for them on my computer, and it'll tell me where I should look.
- Parts on hand should be treated as a subset of parts in the world. When I'm designing a new assembly and searching for a bolt to use in it, I want to access a single interface that will allow me to search either globally (the entire catalog of uniquely addressable parts in the world), from a single manufacturer/distributor, or only from my in-stock catalog. On the other hand, when I'm physically looking at a particular item in my inventory, I should have easy access to the product specs for replacement parts and compatible mating parts.
- Inventory should be tracked in real time. When I remove parts from physical inventory, my database of stocked components should be updated immediately. As sensor technology evolves, it is my hope that this will be possible with minimal user interaction (e.g. via the use of pressure, proximity, or chemical presence sensors within the parts cabinet). In the meantime, the parts cabinet itself (or at the very least a nearby iPad running dedicated software) should offer me the ability to quickly update quantity on hand.
- Complete part data should be available at the part's physical location. If I'm browsing for a bolt, I should be able to have access to all available part data for that bolt - including specifications, tolerances, 3D models, compatible mates, replacements - right at the parts cabinet. For now, this could be achievable by some user gesture at the parts cabinet (e.g. pressing a tactile switch at the individual part compartment) pushing a notification to a nearby iPad. As interaction hardware evolves, I would hope that this would happen within the parts organizer itself, through the use of haptic/gestural info (picking a part out of a bin) and integrated displays.
- My purchasing system should know what parts I have on hand. When I order parts, it's almost exclusively through webstores. When I hit the "confirm your order" page, I want my inventory tracking software to scan for similar parts in my database and alert me if I've got anything in stock that would work for what I'm doing. If I'm ordering M4x12 button head cap screws and I have M4x12 socket head cap screws in stock, it's possible that I could save time, money, and inventory space by redesigning my assembly to accept what I have in stock. Conversely: When I place an order, my inventory system should know about it and prepare my parts organizer to accept new inventory.
- Everything should have a 3D model. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. It blows my mind that many PCBs are designed without a digital visual check for interferences, and the situation is even crazier when you consider integrating PCBs into mechanical assemblies. I've spent a lot of time modeling off-the-shelf components for my own use, and have begun posting them on GrabCAD for others to use. It's my hope that this type of thing catches on, and that manufacturers find ways to support/help the effort.
- No paper. My previous parts organizers relied heavily on sticky notes and Sharpies, as I suspect most contemporary systems do. This is absurd. What happens when you run through stock of a particular part, and decide not to reorder? Well, you spend ten minutes scraping a crusty old label off of the bin, or taping over it with a new one. Adhesives fail over time, and pen-and-paper just isn't modular enough for the rapid changes in direction that modern product development shops go through. My bins should be unlabeled. Instead, I'll identify parts by comparing them to their 3D models (viewable in my parts organizer's interactive display), or - better yet - by my parts organizer knowing what I'm doing (through whatever gestural interaction it uses) and telling me what I'm looking at.
What I've described here is huge, but not that conceptually complex. It also has the capacity to be expanded recursively, to apply to all kinds of physical and digital objects. A cohesive, consistent system for tracking and managing parts will allow for improvements in innovation and distribution techniques to reach their full potential. And I worry that without such a system, the benefits of rapid prototyping, just-in-time manufacturing, and distributed, adaptive supply chains will be highly constrained.
Seth Godin on Bookstores
All things being equal, I'd prefer to have some romance in my life. But I have a really hard time with people who insist on gushing about books. Eulogizing the publishing industry reminds me of something Matthew Yglesias wrote recently:
You've heard a lot over the past 10 to 15 years about the crisis of American journalism, but it's actually been a crisis for American journalists.
Seth Godin's recent blog post ("An End of Books," 2013.08.15) strikes much the tone I would want to use regarding book publishing (emphasis is mine):
None of these changes, by themselves, are enough to kill a venerable information delivery and cultural touchstone like the book. But all of them together? I’m writing this on a train filled with educated, upper income suburban commuters of all genders and ethnicities (book buyers, until recently). I can see 40 people at a glance, and 34 are using electronic devices, two are asleep and exactly one person is reading a traditional book.
Yes, we're entering a new golden age for books, one with more books and ebooks being written and read today than ever before. No, books won’t be completely eliminated, just as vinyl records are still around (a new vinyl store is opening in my little town). But please don’t hold your breath for any element of the treasured ecosystem to return in force.
Is it traitorous to my tribe to write these words? I'm not arguing that we should push the ecosystem out the door, but I am encouraging us to not spend too much time trying to save it. First, it's a losing battle, but more important, we have bigger opportunities right in front of us.
...
I fear that our cultural and corporate connections to books as a delivery system may blind us to the alternatives.
I think this is a great perspective to have.
Machinery's Handbook should be a Wiki.
That's it.
Jack Rusher
From today:
Yeah... like I said, I'm excited to check out some 3D scanners.
More modeling
For reasons I won't go into right now, I spent some time today modeling a Thomson seatpost. It's a fun little project, and one that involves some weird intersecting surfaces. I definitely got some good use out of my radius gage set, and even plunked down to get a new one that goes up to 1" (mine, a Brown & Sharpe set that I got from an old machinist, is 1/32"-1/2").
While I'm excited to check out the new 3D scanners soon (I'm hoping this weekend's Maker Faire will have a couple), manually measuring and modeling something like this is pretty fun. It's interesting to think about the way the geometries work. A Thomson seatpost consists of three main parts, which take a number of manufacturing techniques:
- The post is made from an oblong extrusion. Its OD looks like a circle with a lobe on the front and back, and its ID is an ellipse with its short axis oriented front-back. After being extruded, it's turned down to its finished diameter and milled to accept the saddle cradle and hardware. I'm guessing that both of these operations happen in a cool multiaxis turning center, but they could just as well be done in separate setups.
- The lower cradle is forged. I believe it's also machined, though only on one side and probably just one or two passes.
- The top cradle (not shown - I still need to model it) is also forged. I believe the bolt slots are then machined, and of course the Thomson logo is laser etched after anodization.
The hardware is made by a combination of forging, cold thread forming, turning, and machining. It's also all hardened.
Thomson is a badass manufacturing company. I'm excited to finish this portion of my modeling, which amounts to describing the parts they engineered, and move onto the really cool part - screwing with all of it.
Modeling for SLA
I spent a little while today optimizing my dummy headset for 3D printing. In subtractive manufacturing, cost can often be estimated by calculating the difference between the mass of the raw material and the mass of the finished object. The more material you need to remove, the more fabrication time and resources you'll consume producing the part, and hence the more expensive (generally) it will be.
The cost structure of 3D printing is totally different. With additive techniques, cost is a largely a function of the mass of the finished object (envelope size also has an effect in production settings, but it's less critical). The cost of a part comes down to how long it takes to make, and production time is limited by the amount of material the machine can spit out in a period of time.
As I noted the other day, my dummy headset is a bit more expensive than I'd like it to be. On the upside, though, I can remove material in a bunch of places! I took the revolved part in Inventor and made a series of revolved cuts on the ID of the part. I left some ribs along the ID to keep the perimeter somewhat intact, and left the areas right around the set screw holes thick.
I was able to shave a *lot* of mass off the parts - more than 45% on the lower part - which means significant cost savings.
I still need to make sure I'm on the right track on clearances in a few locations, but cutting the extra material out should make these parts much more feasible. Keep in mind, my total development cost at this point is probably 2.5 hours of labor and $40 in parts. Were I trying to get this product to market quickly (and who knows, I may try doing so) I could be live in both Shapeways' - and my own - webstore within two weeks.
Another 3D Printed thing: Dummy Chris King Headset
I can't justify the cost on this, but with some small modifications I could print a lot of them before I hit the price of the molds I'd need to injection mold them.
Most framebuilders, and a lot of bike shops, will have a frameset (that's frame and fork, for the uninitiated) around the shop for some time before the headset is ready to be installed. Optimally, they're able to be kept together and protected - both from things around the shop and from each other - and the natural solution is to temporarily install the fork in the head tube. For a variety of reasons, though, you don't always want to install a headset just yet, and in those cases it's useful to have a dummy that approximates the size and shape of the headset that you're eventually going to use.
When I was building bikes, I made a batch of dummy headsets out of aluminum on my lathe. It was a fun project, but it took a while and the finished thing didn't look at all like the headsets (usually Chris King) that I was installing on the bikes when they were done. Moreover, a lot of small time builders either don't have access to a lathe or don't have the time/energy/gumption to build dummy headsets themselves.
So I spent an hour or two and modeled this one. It's a damn close copy to a King 1-1/8" NoThreadSet, but SLA printed. I included two holes in the top "cup" that I'll tap out and install set screws in. When the dummy is installed on the frameset, the set screws can be tightened down to keep the whole thing together. Because the dummy is plastic, it won't mar the frame, and because it's dimensionally accurate, it could be used to mock up the steering column for use in rack building, component setup, etc.
I need to make a few small changes to reduce printing mass, but in the meantime the design files for these parts are all in a GitHub repo. If I can find a way to get the cost down a bit, I'm hoping to put them up for sale for other folks to use; drop me a line if you're interested.
What I want my sailboat to tell me.
I only own a racing dinghy - a standard Laser - but I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the challenges of owning a midsized racer/cruiser. I'm thinking in particular about boats in the 25-50 foot range, whose owners who use them for recreation only. In my experience, a boat can become just like a second house - except that you don't live there, and a lot of what you do when you're there is maintain it. It's also particularly difficult to monitor, though with improvements in wireless technology and low-power sensor networks, there are a lot of opportunities in this space.
There are currently a few services for monitoring boat status. Siren Marine's products are especially cool, offering position/geofencing alerts, bilge activity, temperature battery monitoring, and basic security features - all accessible from an iOS app. BoatMonitor offers mooring/anchorage geofencing alerts too, though their system requires a smartphone or tablet to be left powered on onboard the boat. Gost Global offers what appears to be a robust marine security system, aimed specifically at protection from theft.
Of the three, Siren comes closest to what I would want: A full marine monitoring suite which treats a boat like Nest treats a home. In addition to what Siren, BoatMonitor and Gost give me, I would want access to the level of every consumable (fuel, water, cooking gas) onboard; a variety of exterior environmental monitors; detailed data on bilge and sump pump usage; a variety of sensor data from the living cabin; and the ability to trigger any number of onboard instruments and functions from a remote location. If you'll excuse the "x for y" analogy, it's Canary for your boat. Here, in more detail:
- Quantity of available drinking water
- Quantity of available fuel
- Quantity of available cooking fuel (LPG)
- Waste holding tank status
- Boat bearing
- Wind direction/speed
- Barometric pressure
- Wave height
- GPS location (optimally via GPS RTK)
- Cabin temperature
- Cabin humidity (taken in multiple locations to isolate potential leaks/open hatches)
- Presence of fuel in the bilge
- Presence of microbes in the bilge
- Sound level in the cabin
- Vibration on the mast/shrouds (useful for detecting rigging failure)
- Vibration on the hull (useful for detecting that the boat has run aground/been struck by another vessel)
- Cabin entry monitoring
- Remote circuit breaker control
- Most recent bilge/sump pump activity & duration
- Bilge/sump water level
Most of these factors I'd want current and historical data on, so I could see, for instance, a sharp spike in cabin humidity due to a leak. I'd also insist that the entire system be self sustaining via solar cells or wind power - there's too much of each of those for me to be draining my batteries to power a couple of sensors and a GSM antenna.
I'm hoping to be working more on this system in the coming months, and will update my progress as I do.
Work-ish: 3D printed dropout protectors
I think Nick Pinkston has it absolutely right: "3D printing is great, but it's only a small part of the solution." The current hardware revolution is about the workflow from development to manufacturing to distribution. Sure, I'm sure I'll have more and more 3D printed objects in my life in the next 5-10 years. But the effects of product customization (which will be significant) and kanban/just-in-time manufacturing (which I believe will be huge) will far outweigh the designer's ability to neglect draft angles when designing plastic parts. In the near future, I expect we'll be buying more stuff that hasn't been built yet than we have since the industrial revolution. In the next decade, I expect Amazon (or whomever) to be literally building the parts required to fulfill my order the night after I place the order. 3D printing will be a big part of this process, but so will distributed manufacturing and rapid delivery systems. And innovative ways of finding new products (and, on the flipside, innovative ways of finding new customers) will totally change the game.
I tend to recoil at most of the crap that's made with the current generation of FDM machines, but I've spent some time recently trying to think of objects in my life that I would accept being shat out of a MakerBot. A few traits I was looking for:
- Needs to be made out of plastic
- Needs to be disposable
- Needs to have a rough surface quality (low layer resolution)
- Needs to be something that's hard to find in a brick-and-mortar store
- Relatively low part mass, to reduce print time & cost
- Low dimensional accuracy to accommodate all sorts & conditions of printers
- Bonus points if I wouldn't want to buy it from Amazon due to package quantity, lead time, etc.
I'm sure there are better use cases, but one thing I came up with was dropout spacers. When shipping a bike, you usually remove the front wheel and install a dropout spacer into the fork. The spacer protects the dropouts from impact from below and also protects the fork from impacts from the side. Most consumers don't keep dropout spacers around, and wouldn't necessarily think to go to a bike shop to pick some up (most shops give them away) when they're shipping their bike. When the bike is unboxed on the other end, the spacers usually go straight to the trash, and surface finish is totally inconsequential. Plus, the spacer itself isn't very massive, and the dimensional accuracy required is low.
I spent an hour or two modeling, and got Shapeways to print me the result for $13. It's a bit more than I would want to pay for a piece of plastic, but the FDM version would be basically free. The finished version is shown below. I rather like it, and think that things like it will be printed - not in the home, probably, but by brick-and-mortar third party services like Kinkos, or web shopping platforms like Amazon and Shapeways - as a matter of course in the future.
If anyone is interested in printing one of their own, I'd encourage them to grab the model on the Thingiverse. I also published the model and a bunch of other stuff in a GitHub repository.
Pickling Cucumbers
Lyle Lovett on Dressing
You're saying something with your appearance whether you mean to or not, so you may as well mean to. For example, on a weekend morning, you might actually mean to say, "It's Saturday and I don't care how I look, and I don't care what you think of how I look, and I don't care if I ever have sex again."
You might really mean that. But you'd better think about what you're saying, because everyone else is. The idea that we humans are good-natured, politically correct, nonjudgmental beings is pure fantasy. We are, at the very least, judgmental.
...
Fashion is communication, plain and simple. I don't mean to sound as though I'm telling you something you don't already know, because any self-respecting man with even a little common sense knows exactly what he's saying and to whom he's saying it as he gets dressed in the morning. We all wear uniforms of sorts that allow us to be accepted. There's no shame in that. That we have the gumption to clean up and, as we stare into our closet, care about how we'll look shows we're trying to put our best foot forward.
Lyle Lovett in Esquire. Via Timoni.
Coolest
via Language Log.
GitHub for 3D Design
In the past, I've used Autodesk Vault for version tracking & backup of 3D design files. I was using Inventor for work at the time, and was a part of a group that sometimes (though not often) shared files. It was useful but totally inconvenient, and I'm happy to now be setting up GitHub for my own 3D design file sharing, version control & backup.
Not being fluent with GitHub in the past, I'm still a little hazy on the terminology and process. Over the past few months, I've cobbled together a system or organizing 3D part and assembly files from SolidWorks and Inventor. For some reason, I set up separate folders (named "SolidWorks" and "Inventor") in the "Documents" folder of my hard drive. Inside each of those folders is a bunch of separate project folders. When I create a new project, I choose a two-letter shorthand for the project; the project folders have been named, e.g., "CS Cycles Parts". Inside is a bunch of part and assembly files, and usually a subfolder called "Static Exports" which contains STLs, STPs, PDFs and JPEGs.
I'm doing this all from Windows 7 on Boot Camp, so I downloaded the Windows GitHub client and got started. First, I tried creating a new repository on the GitHub web interface and then adding existing files to it, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out the dialog. Then I realized that I could drag and drop a directory from my hard drive into the desktop GitHub client, but for some reason it kept wanting to reassign the repository to .../Documents/GitHub/. Also, it complained about special characters, so I removed all the spaces from my directory names and replaced them with underscores.
Finally I just created new repositories in the desktop client, but named them the same as the existing project directories. GitHub kept wanting me to put them in the /Documents/GitHub directory, but this time I could change the location to be /Documents/Inventor/ - the parent of the existing repository directory that I was trying to set up.
My first commits all just had titles like "First Posting," and I published the commits immediately. To my immense pleasure, I'm now able to see the contents of those directories in GitHub, and a bunch of the files in the "Static Exports" directories display in Git's STL viewer within the browser.
I'll be interested in seeing how GitHub fits into my design workflow. For now it's - at the very least - a great backup system. I hope it becomes a collaborative tool for me in the near future.
If anyone has tips for how to use GitHub to host design projects, I'd love to hear them.
Be Happy.
It should be noted that this was diagrammed within the context of one's career. Otherwise, there would definitely be spaces for family/friends, health/physicality, and possibly a spot for pizza.