I received the shipment of my rack ends yesterday.
Receiving parts is always really fun. I bagged them up into individual shipments last night, and will get them in the mail on Monday.
They're pretty, right?
Manufacturing guy-at-large.
Hardware Updates
Yesterday I received new PCBs for The Public Radio, and quickly built up a few units.
These will go out to beta testers early next week.
Building them up has been really fun - they work well, and all of the parts are organized in a way that makes assembly pretty straightforward. Getting everything all knolled nicely actually helps a significant amount in PCB assembly - now, if I can just get my parts organizer up and running...
Feltron
Nick Felton, in an interview with The Great Discontent:
Certainly, the Annual Report personal project has elevated my career enormously, but it was only one of many personal projects that I tried along the way—no one gave a hoot about most of them. Not letting that discourage me, I kept trying other things. It wasn’t about finding “the idea,” but putting things out that I thought were worth doing and seeing if anyone cared. If not, I moved along.
What It Would Be
I've spent much of the past few weeks thinking about how to proceed on my DMLS seatmast topper project. Since I posted my findings on DMLS pricing in mid January, it has became the most viewed thing I've written here. It's also become (aside from my home and "feed" pages) the most popular landing page on my site, due to both high search term ranking and the fact that it's been shared around the 3D printing community extensively.
There are a few distinct goals moving forward, which represent partially overlapping ideas of what I'm working on.
- Develop a body of knowledge and understanding which encompasses the advanced manufacturing industry and the supply chain logistics required to sustain businesses selling engineered 3D printed consumer products.
- Develop deep experience operating the toolchain required to design said parts for manufacturing. Includes parametric solid/NURBS modeling, organic T-spline modeling, topology optimization modeling, and DFM/CAM software.
- Design said parts, and have them manufactured & tested. Use the resulting data to develop an understanding of the mechanical properties and DFM guidelines for parts made via DMLS and other advanced processes.
- Develop & launch distribution & sales operations (likely e-tail), and sell physical product there.
- Do some/all of the above with bicycle parts as a specific focus.
Many of the points here are not mutually exclusive; point 5 certainly entails many/all of the previous items. But my path forward depends crucially on whether I approach this as primarily a research project - or as a business.
On one hand, I'd like to move forward in a rapid, directed manner. Doing so will require resources, however, and may inevitably constitute a full-time job. In order to fund such an effort, I'd need to show a near-term market fit - which will require me to approach this specifically as a business.
On the other hand, I'm aware that there are benefits to approaching this primarily as research. I ultimately want to learn; building a business is just one of many ways of doing so. Moreover, there are any number of businesses which address parts like mine, and selling bicycle products doesn't apply to all of them. It's possible that advanced supply chain logistics is a better fit for my knowledge and skillset. Focusing on the bike market might not be the best way to approach such a goal.
Regardless, it's likely that I refine and then purchase a seatmast topper in the coming weeks. This will require a small investment on my part (a few thousand dollars), plus about a week's work. I'll learn a few things about the process, and going through a build will give me an opportunity to cement relationships with suppliers and processing & testing partners.
Assuming the test part is functional, the next step would probably be to feel around the market a bit. This topper will be on the expensive side, and though I'm confident it'll sell, branding it will be delicate. Finding an audience, and defining the product in a way that they can relate to, will be an interesting exercise.
With a bit of luck, I'll have a working assembly + a landing page with preorders by Memorial Day. Stay tuned.
Technology
Douglas Adams, in a 1999 post titled "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet."
Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’
Grinder mods update
Got this updated part a few weeks ago, and it's looking promising.
Shown here mounted on the pentagonal shaft head on a Porlex mini grinder. The shaft of the part fits in a standard hand drill/driver.
What I really want here is to put a little DC gearmotor on one of these hand grinders, and then link it up with my GCal so that it grinds coffee for me every morning when my alarm goes off. We'll get there.
My Mailing List
Kevin Shea Adams
From Kevin Shea Adams.
Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitz, in an old blog post titled "Why We Prefer Founding CEOs." Emphasis mine.
The music business has been continuously disrupted and revolutionized by the underlying technology since the outset. In fact, it’s still widely referred to as the “record industry,” because the entire business was created by the invention of the vinyl record. For the first few decades of the industry, songs were never longer than 3 minutes due to a technological limitation (the record would skip if the grooves were too thin). The album itself is a construct that originated with the total number of songs one could fit on a 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Minute (RPM) vinyl record. In the 80s, the invention of the CD completely revitalized the industry and led to (literally) record-breaking sales.
Despite this dynamic history, modern record company executives badly missed the most sweeping technical innovation—the Internet. How was that possible? By the time the Internet arrived, all of the original founders of the record companies had been bought out, retired, or died. The new, professional CEOs were unwilling to let go of the most basic assumptions driving the cost structure of their businesses. Specifically, they wouldn’t give up their stranglehold on distribution and the value they placed on owning the recording.
They were proficient at running the current business, but lacked both the courage and the moral authority to jeopardize the old business model by embracing the new technology. The transition would have been far easier if these executives running the companies had invented the old models. The founders of the music industry likely would have ditched old assumptions, because they would have been nuts to do continue believing an assumption that no longer makes sense.
Conversely, Netflix, run by cofounder Reed Hastings, provides an excellent counter-example. Faced with a similar transition (from distribution of the physical recording to electronic distribution of the bits), Netflix let go of its old assumption that customers wanted DVDs mailed to them, invested in innovation and produced a series of brilliant new offerings (streaming video to Xbox 360, Sony Playstation 3, Tivo, Wii, connected DVD players, and a host of devices) that are enabling them to transition smoothly. Hastings wasn’t married to the old distribution model precisely because he invented it.
Equity
From Yiren Lu's very good opinion piece in this week's NYTimes Magazine, "Silicon Valley's Youth Problem." Emphasis mine.
These are places where the C.E.O. often sits alongside the engineers, where recruiters talk about a “flat” hierarchy as a perk on par with paternity leave, where regular engineers get equity. Some of these changes have occurred out of necessity. “In the ‘80s, it was not uncommon to pay people salaries and give them few if any stock options,” Biswas said. “Now, you can’t have a company like Facebook and attract that kind of talent without offering equity.”
Ownership is *really* powerful.
Make sure it tastes good
David C. Novak, former COO of Pepsi, talking about Pepsi Crystal in an interview with Fast Company:
It was a tremendous learning experience. I still think it's the best idea I ever had, and the worst executed. A lot of times as a leader you think, "They don't get it; they don't see my vision." People were saying we should stop and address some issues along the way, and they were right. It would have been nice if I'd made sure the product tasted good. Once you have a great idea and you blow it, you don't get a chance to resurrect it.
Not engineering exercises
From a post on Medium by the very smart team at Bolt.io:
Conduct prototype builds as science experiments not engineering exercises. Have a hypothesis about one specific thing, build something to test that hypothesis, test it, and then analyze your results. Too often startups build a full functional prototype before testing basic assumptions they’re making about their users. Reduce your prototype iteration time as much as possible, and then a bit more.
Unsolved problems
Kegan Schouwenburg's advice to entrepreneurs working in 3D printing, from an interview with Ideas Lab:
Do something that isn’t being done currently. There are so many unsolved problems in 3D printing, and it seems like everybody is focusing on the same one right now, which is basically: Let’s make a cheaper 3D printer. But that problem has been solved. We have that. I think the question now becomes, How do we create products that people want? How do we develop the infrastructure to support that?
Something unexpected
Gui Cavalcanti, writing in Make about the difference between various types of hardware coworking spaces:
To me, ‘hacking’ and ‘hacker’ are fundamentally exclusionary; whether they refer to the traditional act of programming to defeat or circumvent existing systems, or the act of working with physical parts, there’s a basic understanding that ‘hacking’ refers to a specific subset of activities that involve making existing objects do something unexpected.
I'm not sure I would have put this just so, but I think there's something interesting here.
The bloggy way of doing it
Felix Salmon, writing about Newsweek's handling of the Satoshi Nakamoto case:
The bitcoin community is just that — a community — and while there have been many theories as to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, those theories have always been tested in the first instance within the community. Bitcoin, as a population, includes a lot of highly-intelligent folks with extremely impressive resources, who can be extremely helpful in terms of testing out theories and either bolstering them or knocking them down. If Newsweek wanted the greatest chance of arriving at the truth, it would have conducted its investigation openly, with the help of many others. That would be the bloggy way of doing it, and I’m pretty sure that Goodman would have generated a lot of goodwill and credit for being transparent about her process and for being receptive to the help of others.
Premortem
More from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Emphasis mine.
Organizations may be better able to tame optimism and individuals than individuals are. The best idea for doing so was contributed by Gary Klein, my "adversarial collaborator" who generally defends intuitive decision making against claims of bias and is typically hostile to algorithms. He labels his proposal the premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: "Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster."
...The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction.
As a team converges on a decision - and especially when the leader tips her hand - public doubts about the wisdom of the planned move are gradually suppressed and eventually come to be treated as evidence of flawed loyalty to the team and its leaders. The suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice. The main virtue of the premortem is that it legitimizes doubts. Furthermore, it encourages even supporters of the decision to search for possible threats that they had not considered earlier.
This is a brilliant idea.
Relative Position
Nick Denton, talking about Uber in a great interview on Playboy (SFW). Emphasis mine.
Markets are more efficient mechanisms for the distribution of services. The only thing that happens if you don't have surge pricing in a city like New York is that the limos and the cars dry up at certain times. Then nobody gets anything. And maybe that's the point. Maybe the point is that human beings are not so much concerned with their well-being as with their relative position. If they can't have access to this thing that's in short supply, then they don't want anybody else to either.
ST Clamp
An alumide Shapeways model I had made a month or so ago:
This is an alumide model of a part that I've gotten quoted in DMLS a few times recently. This part probably wouldn't be printed in its current design - at least as anything other than an exercise in showing that it's possible. The shape simply isn't optimized for additive manufacturing, and it would take a lot of re-imagination in order to change that.
Still, it's a start - and because of its volume/mass ratio, it would be an interesting part to explore deeper.
Old
This is me, working on this bike, a long time ago.
A quick thought: Angle of Organizational Repose
Thinking about the [citation needed] trend of traditionally hierarchical organizations going flat. Remembering how much I like the term "angle of repose."
Think there's something here.
It seems likely that there is some angle of repose for hierarchy in an organization. I hesitate, though, to suggest (literally or figuratively) that highly hierarchical organizations can't support themselves/will tend to collapse under their own weight. That seems a bit too on-the-nose, and anyway the analogy gets really complicated really quickly. There are too many factors to consider in an organization's structure, and each must be considered against an arbitrarily large set of organizational purposes & principles.
Still, it's a fun comparison to consider.