From an interesting piece on open-electronics.org titled "The Truth About Open Source Hardware Business Models." Emphasis mine.
A successful hardware design – being it closed or open doesn’t matter – will be copied once successful and – as Nathan Seidle often pointed out in interviews – market advantage resides in company elasticity and in the capability to innovate rapidly a product portfolio.
Miya Tokumitsu, arguing (compellingly) against "do what you love" in Slate:
Nothing makes exploitation go down easier than convincing workers that they are doing what they love.
From a BBC article on Google X's policy of rewarding failure:
You must reward people for failing, he says. If not, they won't take risks and make breakthroughs. If you don't reward failure, people will hang on to a doomed idea for fear of the consequences. That wastes time and saps an organisation's spirit.
Yup.
Just had a quick brainstorm re: rack mounting. My 4-A rack ends address the bottom of the rack, but the top of the rack is equally challenging. One common way to attach a rack is through the brake hole on the frame/fork. I would always turn down the head of a M6 SHCS so that it could be inserted into the rack tubing; I'd then use a standard recessed brake nut on the backside. I made a quick & dirty sketch:
It might be useful to have these parts pre-made, so that rack builders don't need to turn their own on a lathe. If you'd be interested in a part like this, holler at me!
Somewhere near Ithaca, NY.
Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting two excellent resources in the world of additive manufacturing. What follows is all in relation to my titanium 3D printed bike seatmast topper project.
On Wednesday I sat down in the Brooklyn Navy Yard with Kaveh and Siavash of Within Lab. Within's software takes solid models as input and allows the engineer to convert them to 3D lattice structures in order to reduce mass and build time - and maintain structural integrity. Their software is no joke; it's clear that for engineered mechanical products, Within Enhance is going to be key to making 3D printing a viable manufacturing method.
There were a few key takeaways:
It's also worth noting that I really need to redesign the saddle clamp if I'm going to take full advantage of the manufacturing process. Again, though, I'll probably hold off for now and just focus on getting one of these made - and on a bike - ASAP.
On Thursday, I got a facility tour of Incodema (warning: autoplaying audio on their site!), a job shop in Ithaca NY with DMLS, CNC, stamping, wire EDM, and welding capabilities. I also got a chance to talk in depth with Scott about their DMLS capabilities and the idiosyncrasies of my project.
Some of the parts that Incodema commonly makes.
A few interesting things that I learned here:
I also got a chance to see a bunch of other DMLS parts in their shop. Most were NDA and couldn't be photographed, but this demo knife blade was pretty cool :)
It's a little hard to see, but almost everything on the top left side of this image is support structures (the part is built with the blade edge up), which can be snapped off manually. Support structures on parts like this are built with perforations in a couple different dimensions, including along the part edge, so removal isn't too hard. The resulting blank still needs to be post processed pretty heavily, though - this knife will require polishing, probably some tapping, and the blade will need to be sharpened as well. My part had an estimated 1 hour of post processing, which seems really reasonable to me.
I need to spend some time reconfiguring my design. It's likely that I strip away a few more features, and possibly redesign the bolt boss as well. I then need to think a bit on how I can prep for support structures, and whether I can remove areas of the part (especially around the saddle clamp tube) in order to reduce build time and mass. It's possible that I'll reduce the offset of the topper as well, as it both increases mass and also requires a lot more support in order to build the part.
I'll be putting a bit more time into this project over the coming week; expect updates.
In 2010 I built a short production run of singlespeed bikes, dubbed The Realster. They were intended to be a practical take on the urban fixed gear. From the original product copy:
I believe in minimizing the degree to which my customers need to reorganize their lives in order to ride their bikes. On this project - a short production run of five framesets - I wanted to design a fixed gear bike that would be easy to use on a daily basis. The bike needed fenders, a rack, a comfortable riding position and a bell. It also needed good brakes, generous tire clearance and a reasonable pricetag. It should reward, not punish, you for riding it.
Enter the Realster. It's an upright, practical fixed gear for urban use. The stock version, shown below, sports swept-back handlebars, natural contact points (cork grips and a leather saddle) and a custom made porteur rack with salvaged cross-sawn hard maple slats.
I was in my old shop the other day and snapped a few quick photos of the stock Realster, which I kept for myself. The build is really casual, which is rare for me - but I really like it. I'm particularly fond of its rack, which was an early project that used my rack ends.
There's one of these framesets that never got built up; I recently put it on Etsy.
This is from a while ago - late summer 2010. At the time, it was one of my proudest pieces of physical output, but somehow I never got around to properly sharing it on the internet. I never photographed it properly either, so these iPhone shots will have to do for now :/
I love the belt drive, but am now quite a bit less enamored of the Alfine setup. The frame is pretty awesome, though (it's all Reynolds 953 mar-aging stainless steel), and I'm *really* proud of the racks.
This bike was the real impetus for me to make my own rack ends. I also made a few other little bits on the bike, including a pretty cool seatstay bridge with hidden fasteners for the rear rack.
Incidentally, the mushroom-head velcro on the front rack is a pretty slick way to attach commonly used things to a rack surface.
An old photo, taken during a day of boots-on-the-ground research on clearcoatable decals with powder coating.
This process was a PITA but the result is pretty cool. The decals are basically baked right into the frame. The guy I had doing my powder at the time didn't understand the process fully, so I spent the better part of a day there with him, working through it.
Last week, with Jace.
An early idea of mine was to replace the whole drive bolt on the Mini Slim (there's no reason it couldn't be a hexagonal drive) but ultimately that'd be costlier and would require a lot more disassembly/reassembly by the user.
If you've struggled with your Hario grinder in the past, hit me up!
As described here, my 4-A rack ends grew out of a much simpler design that I had watercut out of stainless steel plate in 2010.
As it happens, I've got about 40 of these little guys left, and I'm glad to offer them as "cherry on top" rewards for anyone who backs my Indiegogo campaign. If you're a backer, I'll offer you a 50% match on these parts. In other words: you buy 16 of my 4-A rack ends, and I'll give you 8 of these plate ends. Just shoot me an email and tell me how many 4-A ends you've pledged for, and I'll add these to your order for no additional charge. I've only got a limited quantity of these, so give me a holler soon!
These are actually pretty great rack ends, and I'm sure that plenty of builders would get good use out of them!
After doing even more research on DMLS pricing (update soon), I played around a bit today with designing a seatpost collar.
The design here is pretty straightforward. I'm using fairly standard barrel nuts and a M5 bolt (I'll steal these from a Thomson collar I have laying around), and the part profile isn't trying to be innovative either.
I'm getting this printed in alumide (a mixture of nylon and aluminum) for an aesthetic/basic form/function mockup, and will look into pricing on the part too. I suspect that it could be relieved in a bunch of places still (to reduce build time & cost) but for now I don't care too much - I just want to get a functional stainless or titanium part on a bike ASAP.
Updates when Shapeways ships, probably before Valentine's day.
NOTE: The Hario/Porlex compatible drill adapter shown below is available for sale! You can find it on Shapeways, here.
I got a Hario Skerton manual coffee grinder a few years back, but quickly grew tired of the hand cranking (+ the jumps & catches & spills I frequently had with it). So I retrofitted mine with a nut instead of a thumbscrew, and have happily been using a drill with a nutdriver to grind my coffee.
A friend has the Hario MSS-1B Mini Slim grinder, and he has it even worse: The shaft has a pentagon stud, which has a loose fit with the stamped handle and is difficult to adapt to a drill. We were talking about his situation this week, and I decided to model a pentagon driver that could be 3D printed and would allow the user to use a drill to grind their coffee easily & quickly.
I realize that this is a pretty small market - people who are okay with having a drill in their kitchen - but I'm curious whether anyone else out there would be interested in something like this. I'll be testing a prototype of the part over the next few weeks; if you're interested, give a holler!
UPDATE: This part worked! And you can buy one for yourself here.
Last night I went to the opening of The Tinnitus Suites at Nothing Space and saw The Lady's Harp in all its splendor.
The experience is a bit beyond words, but I can verify that the instrument is pretty cool. Daniel manipulates the mixing boards, but the Lady's Harp really plays itself.
Photos below. Daniel says he'll be posting the recordings on Soundcloud... eventually :)
Somewhere near Ithaca, the other day.
Shia Labeouf (!) writing in The New Inquiry about the future of creative writing:
Careers and canons won’t be established in traditional ways. I’m not so sure that we’ll still have careers in the same way we used to. Literary works might function the same way that memes do today on the Web, spreading like wildfire for a short period, often unsigned and unauthored, only to be supplanted by the next ripple. While the author won’t die, we might begin to view authorship in a more conceptual way: perhaps the best authors of the future will be ones who can write the best programs with which to manipulate, parse and distribute language-based practices.
I found this essay's discussion of the difference between literature and art/music to be really compelling.
The Lady's Harp is fully assembled, and will be showing at Nothing Space over the next week. Come check it out!
The Public Radio is now contained on three repositories on GitHub. They're all within the same "organization," which is an improvement over the previous implementation. You can find it all here, and I encourage anyone and everyone to check it out and log issue requests/make whatever contributions they can!
The goal with The Public Radio is to maintain it as an open source project. Currently we've got embedded systems hardware data (BRD and SCH files from EagleCad), Arduino sketches, and C++ libraries all in their own repositories. I'm not certain this is the best way to organize everything, but it's a start. When I look at the physical hardware again (probably not until next week), I'll create a new repository for that and put STEP files there. I'm not sure that DXFs or STLs will make the cut, though I suppose they ought to. We'll see how the hierarchy works out.
We will, of course, sell The Public Radio as a fully assembled product, but we'll also maintain the GitHub repositories and try to support anyone who'd prefer to assemble/hack/repurpose the designs instead. We're also intending to sell a barebones kit - assembled PCB only, I think - and allow users to use their own speaker, UI, and enclosure.
GitHub isn't integrated into my workflow, and maintaining the repos will take a bit of elbow grease on my part - but I'm confident it'll be worth it.
Please check the repository out and give your feedback!
