"A traditionally cast frame."

Who knew: Tell people you're designing 3D printed bike parts, and *everyone* will send you some variation on this article. Which is great - it's a totally awesome project, and I think Empire and Renishaw are working on absolutely the right thing. 

But I have a little nit to pick, and it's with the specific wording of the following paragraph (ephasis is mine): 

By using additive manufacturing the MX6 saw a marked decrease in weight. In fact, while the original bike frame weighed 2.1 kg, its 3D printed cousin was slimmed down to 1.4kg - a 33% reduction. What’s more, because Empire’s frame was 3D printed analysis showed it to be denser and stronger than a traditionally cast frame.

Here's the thing: frames aren't traditionally cast. Empire Cycles makes awesome stuff - totally crazytown bikes - but there's very little that's traditional about them. In fact, they're almost specifically atraditional - they use alternative methods of manufacturing partly as an exercise in design and manufacturing prowess. 

Okay. Rant over.

I should be clear: I think this bike is awesome. I especially like the photo of the build platform, which must have been a pain to engineer - even after they'd engineered the assembled product. I think Renishaw and Empire are totally onto something here. I'm just being a punk about the details :/

The Viral Self

Rob Horning, writing in The New Inquiry about virality. Emphasis mine:

Virality, unlike celebrity, isn’t about exclusivity or personal talent; it’s about moving information continually. Wanting to go viral is not the same as wanting to become famous. Whereas a famous person has become a someone, a viral self is always in process of becoming, always proving itself. But it needs only to be circulating; it doesn’t need to climb.

And later, on a different note:

In a consumer society, we aspire to be as popular as the products we are expected to crave.

That last part is brilliant. 

Exactly the right tool

Ian Frazier, writing about his experience developing a tool to remove plastic bags from trees: 

From that point, in a small but real way, my life changed. Having the exact right tool for a particular job is always satisfying, but when the tool (and, indeed, the job) never existed before, the satisfaction is multiplied. Plus, what we were doing, in addition to being fun, actually was benecial to society. In an over-full urban environment, we had found our niche, one we had all to ourselves. Nobody else in New York City, or in the world, was taking plastic bags out of trees. 

And later:

Now I understood, a bit, how people felt who had worked on the construction of some major public landmark like the Empire State Building.

The fun part about developing a useful tool is that it doesn't really matter what it's used for. The fact that it is used, and that it was never used before, is plenty.

Found

via National Geographic Found. 

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During a motorcycle race, speedsters careen into a turn in Sweden, August 1973.PHOTOGRAPH BY ALBERT MOLDVAY, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Camera

Another lil' project, this with Kane. Details to come; in the meantime, enjoy the pretty pictures :)

FYI, the camera body is a Sony A7.

Kern schmern

I'm mostly just posting this to give Jonathan Bobrow, who created the kernel of The Public Radio's logo, a shout out. Anything I've done on top of his original work is, I'm sure, to our detriment. 

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Anyway, I spent a little while kerning today. Cause hey, someone's gotta do it.

Coined Countersinks

This blew my mind! 

A supplier of The Public Radio's stamped lid sent me a catalog of stamping tools, and I took a little while looking though it. This page set me on a google wormhole:

They're talking here about cold working countersink features in sheet metal. The hole is pre-punched and then worked with a tool that moves material around to create a countersink.

This process probably isn't right for The Public Radio - it requires thicker material than we're using - but it's really cool. I googled around a bit and found a textbook on countersinks, which describes a bunch of sheet metal features that I was unaware of:

It would be really fun to explore these. Stamping is really economical at scale, and knowing all the ways it can be used is super interesting.

I wish I still had this mockup

From mid 2010:

This looks simple but there's a lot going on. 

The handle itself is 7 or 8 pieces; this mockup shows it mounted to an assembly of extrusions (all of which I designed, and clad in blackened mahogany) which together make up the stile of a 2000lb swinging door. In the close corner you can actually see the inflatable pneumatic seal (I can't stress how cool this is) that keeps the door weatherproof from the exterior.

The handle has a couple of stainless steel mounting brackets which are hidden inside the stile. Then there are the horizontal parts, which are drilled internally to allow a bundle of wires to be routed from the stile into the handle itself. The vertical part of the handle is actually split along its long dimension, though you can't see it in the photo. The part on the right is solid, but the part on the left (towards the stile) rides on a couple of shafts and actuates about 1/16". When you grab the handle, the moving part clicks in just a little bit and closes a pair of tactile switches, which tell the door's brain (a custom ATMega board) that someone wants to be let out. That in turn deflates the pneumatic seal and releases a couple of electromagnets, unlocking the door.

If you followed any of that, kudos. 

Anyway it's fucking cool. Too bad it never got built - it took me months to design & prototype. 

Sure was a fun project, though.

Typical.

I try to sit in the kitchen with Zach & Libo, but sometimes I need to move to my desktop to do 3D stuff. 

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From the Archives: Carl Andre

I drew this in 2006, when I visited MoMA; the text is a word for word copy of the placard accompanying "144 Lead Square". I still feel deeply conflicted about MoMA & Andre's description of the intent of the work, especially vis a vis the last sentence.

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But I do rather enjoy my transcription & doodle as meta-art :/

Graphs that go "like this: /"

Well, it's official: The Public Radio soft-launched yesterday. And we even did it with a clever domain name (I think): 

thepublicrad.io

It's not as if I've got a ton of direct experience performing any of the tasks that Zach and I have managed over the past six months, but there's been something striking to me about the past two days. It's this:

This is a fairly big deal to me. The overall numbers are small relative to what can happen when web startups launch, but the quick jump in viewership of our product - this fucking *thing* that we've been working on for so long - is real a kick. In the past, my web presence has taken a much longer time to develop. TCD spent years in the dark corners of the internet, and this site has bumped along as well, growing slowly over time. But The Public Radio is a product that a certain type of person just gets, and we've stumbled upon a handful of those people.

The best part has been seeing the Mailchimp roster grow, and noticing "@npr.org" pop up way more than we had expected. It makes sense, of course - we got a few public radio folks checking us out, and they must have shared it with colleagues - but it's still a bit of a trip to see it actually happen. 

This next few weeks should be fun. We've got PCBs showing up from China in about two weeks, and I'll probably order prototype quantities of antennae ( :/ ) and lids tomorrow too. Our BOM is basically complete, and the majority of our engineering work is done, and so now is the time to really work on understanding our customers & suppliers.

On that note: We're actively pursuing partnerships with NPR and affiliate stations for The Public Radio. We think it would be a great fund drive gift for any station, and would love to be put in touch with anyone working in FM radio, public or private. If you're reading this and know someone in radio, I'd love an intro. 

We're also looking around for advance press coverage, so send me your ideas on those as well. And feel free to share! We love the attention :)

February is shaping up to be fun :)

Old Glue.

This was a long time ago, when I ordered an in-depth investigation of what adhesives to use to bond mahogany to anodized aluminum. This entrant was not the winner.

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This is actually what my desk looks like.

I love this. A few inches away are a stack of custom PCBs, too :)

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Assembly drawings

Making exploded drawings is fun. After getting the mechanical assembly pretty well dialed - and setting up my drawing template - I banged these out the other day. 

We've got quotes for most of these parts in a BOM now, and should be placing sample size orders in the next few days :)

PR5006 -> PCBCart

We pulled the trigger on this today.

There are a lot of small-to-medium changes here, even from the last photos I posted. 

On the top edge of the board:

• Station tune LED circuit moved to the right. 
• Cap on the tune circuit changed to thru-hole.
• Trimpot package changed, moved outboard.
• Tune circuit moved up and out, to get farther from the antenna trace.
• Big thru-hole coupling capacitor on the battery, in the middle of the right side.

On the bottom edge of the board:

• Speaker traces reversed. I had originally routed negative and vise versa, but apparently that's not cool :/ Oh well.
• Power routed along the perimeter of the board - no longer needs a via to get under the speaker traces.
• Audio in was turned up and to the right for shorter traces & less interference with power.

We should have boards back in roughly two weeks. In the meantime we'll be hustling in like twenty ways so that we can be totally ready. Should be fun :)

Experience alone is a poor substitute for critical thinking.

-me.

New Standards

I've posted previously about my procurement process and elided a crucial detail: my part documentation for the past year has been pretty atrocious. Partly that's because I haven't been buying mostly 3D printed parts, which (when you buy from Shapeways et al) are documented only with STLs, but it's also because I haven't taken the time to set up my own drawing standards. Until yesterday.

This drawing is of the lid for The Public Radio. Depending on quantity it'll either be stamped or laser cut. I'd prefer stamped, but that's mostly because it'll be much less expensive at quantity - and I'd rather sell thousands of parts, not hundreds. 

The details of the drawing itself are rather mundane, but the title block and drawing format involved a number of weighty decisions. A few points:

• I'm using an ISO A3 paper size. Because ISO is cool. 
• I'm dimensioning in millimeters, and have default tolerances in millimeters too. This was a bit of a hurdle for me - I'm comfortable with metric dimensions but used to thinking of tolerances in thousandths of an inch - but I'm excited to be all (or mostly all) metric. Most of the tolerances here are three decimal places, which is basically the same at .13mm = .0051", is totally translatable for me. 
• I'm using decimal points (instead of commas) between the ones column and the tenths column. Because Europe isn't right about everything.
• I don't have any "approved by" field. Fuck standard title blocks, right?
• "BREAK ALL SHARP EDGES." Yes.
• Note: As I'm looking at this, I'm realizing that I should probably relax a number of these tolerances. Which often happens, the more you look at a drawing.
• Revision tables. I start my drawings at "REV -", and then I increment alphabetically from there. This particular drawing was submitted to a few suppliers prior to this drawing standard, so I've incremented to "A" already... it's a little weird, but it works.
• I'm not a huge fan of "TYP" or "typical," but in some cases it makes sense.
• I'm using my part filename as a field in my title block. I considered separate boxes for part number and name, but I'm careful with filenames and this makes it easier.
• I'm using an ISO time string (but with decimal delimiters) throughout. Because ISO is cool.  
• I'm a little flippant in my title block (the "info, documentation & jokes" thing), but it's better than having to list my phone number.

Changes I should probably make:

• I probably need a logo... or something. I don't know, a circle with a dot in it?
• Line weights are off.
• Do I really need to say what sheet it is? It's really only useful if you're documenting assemblies - at least with the simple parts I tend to design.
• I guess I should be marking zones of the drawing space, but I've never done so in the past and never felt like I was missing anything.
• I wish I could get rid of the file extension.

Overall I'm happy about this. Pretty fun.

Being Copied

Bunnie Huang, responding to a question about IP theft in Chinese contract manufacturing. The question is at about 22:30, here.

I'm different than a lot of people - I'm a big fan of open hardware, so before I get to that point with the factory I'll publish my schematics and everything online anyways. Feel free to copy me. Right? And the good news is that your idea was good. You were copied. None of my ideas are ever copied, so obviously they're not very good. 

Found

From National Geographic Found.

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A pipe emits poisonous gases in a flame produced by oil production, April 1948.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MAYNARD OWEN WILLIAMS, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Battery clips on GrabCAD

In case you're designing a piece of electronics and need a battery clip modeled... this MPD PCB mount one that I modeled is on GrabCAD.