Archive for the 'Industrial Design' Category

I have always enjoyed bike riding. I used to stay in the saddle for many consecutive hours in 100+ degree humid midwest weather and loved every minute of it. And mountain biking the Rio Grande Valley in Andrew Stone’s backyard was an absolute blast!

It is something that I missed in New York and Connecticut. When we moved to California, one of the requirements was that I was within biking distance of work.

After a few years of sporadic biking habits, I have been biking to work pretty much every day since the spring of this year and, achieving such consistency and a bit of back pain along with it, felt that it was time to consider an upgrade.

I wanted something comfortable. Something that wouldn’t hurt my back or, frankly, my ass.

I had a chance to briefly ride a recumbent off The Bike Doctor’s truck and was immediately sold on it. The good doctor is also a Bacchetta dealer and the source of said bike. He took great care in tuning and fitting the bike. Highly recommended.

Specifically, the bike is a slightly modified Bacchetta Giro 20. Instead of rim brakes, mine has disc brakes as they perform much better when wet and won’t rub at the slightest bit of out-of-round of the wheel. I also added a botleholder and rear rack.

So comfortable and such a natural position to be using one’s legs. All of the power of a leg press, but in a highly mobile form.

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Nearly 7 years ago and after spending years searching, I finally decided upon a backpack and computer bag. Specifically, I picked up a Brain Bag backpack from Tom Bihn along with a Brain Cell for my computer that snaps into the Brain Bag.

Best. Bag. Ever. Beyond being well made, the design focuses on usability. All pockets are easily accessible, secure, and the zippers are all stitched such that your stuff stays dry even in heavy rains.

After 7 years of medium to heavy use my only complaint is that the damned thing still looks new! Not even a stressed seam, much less a hole, rip, tear, or other defect. I’m only complaining because I have no reason to buy a new bag from Tom Bihn but, damnit, the new designs are cool!

Beyond making great bags, Bihn’s customer service can’t be beat. Twice, I have “lost” 1/2 of the buckle for the waist strap on my brain bag (“lost” as in “n year old slides it off and hides it somewhere, never to be found”).

Both times, I contacted Tom Bihn and had replacements within days. The first time, they drop shipped me one, no questions asked and no $$ paid. This last time, I insisted on buying something to at least cover the shipping. Now I have an awesome little strap extender thingy and they dropped in both a replacement piece and an entire extra buckle, just in case.

Awesome products. Awesome company.

Now, if they would just make a camera bag….

When we lived in New York City, we had these awesome cable lights with hand blown glass pendants and, in the middle in the picture left, an awesome little beaded center piece lamp over our living room table.

One goal of the remodel was to make sure that we had a place for the pendants to finally hang again after being in boxes for the past decade.

The glass pendants are hung above the bar between kitchen and living room and the bead shade was hung over the kitchen table.

But the shade was too small to hang by itself. Thus, we needed additional fixtures.

At first, I soldered a couple of stiff copper wires to the bottom of some 12v MR16 compact fluorescent lamps. Plenty of light, but obviously not terribly pleasant to look at a couple of random bare bulbs hanging about.

I have always been enamored by the cheese grater light fixtures in That 70s Show.

As we were heading to IKEA for other reasons, we decided to poke about the kitchen accessories area to see if anything Light Fixture-esque struck our fancy.

Christine found some ORDNING stainless steel cutlery caddies that seemed pretty close to ideal.

Cheap, too.

So we grabbed a couple and I picked up some silver lamp cord from the local hardware store.

Assembly was trivial:

• Solder ends of lamp cord to ends of lamp
• Tie not in lamp cord just above lamp
• Feed lamp cord through center bottom hole of ORDNING
• Solder stiff copper wire to other end of lamp cord at desired height
• Bend copper wire in a hook to hook over suspended power cables

The end result is clean, simple, and provides great light. Better yet, the interior of the ORDNING has wonderful concentric rings from the machining process.

The blue light at the top of the cabinets is from blue LED rope lights that extend across the top of all cabinets.

Pictured at left is the “Chronochrome“.

Cool idea; use colors to represent numbers, thus creating a neat colorful clock. Like binary clocks (of which I built one of these as one of my first kits ages ago), it is a pleasant bit of blinky art to the uninformed and those given the “secret” can tell the time, further baffling the uninformed.

At first, the pink band made me think the designers were dumb. That instead of going with the standard resistor color codes, they invented some random color mapping.

Not the case.

It is the standard set of colors, just with pink substituted for brown.

I would rather have the brown, but would imagine it is exceedingly difficult to create a “brown” light that doesn’t look black or otherwise odd.

Of course, I full expect to see an AVR based RGB LED implementation of this within about 3 days…

My wife and I are both just a bit bonkers when it comes to glassware.

For general purpose drinking glasses, we want heavy glassware that is dishwasher safe, has a bit of texture, and can contain at least 12 ounces, preferably 16, of the beverage of our choice.

We had found that the ” Mexican glass” style of drinking glasses work really well. It is a heavy, typically bubbled, glass that is well balanced.

Unfortunately, it has a tendency to spontaneously break for no apparent reason.

This is an example. I was sitting in the other room and I heard *pop* *tink ca-tink*. “What the hell was that?”

Investigating, I found that this purple glass had broken rather forcefully, shooting a very large chunk of glass into a bowl near it (and several smaller chunks of glass quite a bit further away).

This wasn’t a case of massive thermal shock. The glass had been washed the day before and left on the towel to dry for nearly 24 hours.

And this isn’t the first glass of this style — and not even of this batch — that we have lost to similar catastrophic surprise failure.

So… if anyone has a suggestion for durable, heavy, dishwasher safe, glasses of a similar magnitude that don’t spontaneously fail, I’d love a pointer!

A little over a year ago, I wrote an entry describing a very simple means of producing extremely tasty grilled pork chops. About a month ago, Tom – Cobb Grill commented on the post. As with all posts that make it through the spam filter, I checked out the post and associated link.

Now, almost all spam is nullified by my spam filters. Some borderline stuff gets through. And the comment was borderline considered within the context of the link.

So, I visited the Art Fleederman and left a bit of feedback to see how serious/legitimate the company might be. I also offered to review the product, if they would send me a Cobb. I’m not above pimping my weblog for free stuff.

There is one simple rule: If said thing is a piece of crap, I’m going to say so in no uncertain terms.

Tom at Art Fleederman took up my offer and sent me a Cobb.

The Cobb is definitely one well designed compact grill. I hesitate to even call it a grill. It is more like a small charcoal-fired convection oven.

I dropped some soaked in-husk corn on the Cobb, which was fueled by 8 or 10 charcoal briquettes and let it sit for about 45 minutes to an hour.

This style is my favorite way to cook corn. Done right, the resulting corn is tender, moist, and will have a bit of a caramelized sugar flavor to it.

It was significantly more moist than the many times I have done the same preparation on a larger grill. And the Cobb only consumed about 60% of the fuel during the cook.

As can be seen in the picture, the Cobb is not a large grill. It can barely fit 4 reasonably sized ears of corn with the lid on!

Yet, it appears to be a very versatile grill. As can be seen in the picture at the left, the firebox is fairly small and sits at the center of the Cobb. What can’t be seen is the moat that surrounds it, into which you can place liquids for steaming and/or vegetables for roasting. It also appears to be possible to cook down sauces in this moat, using the renderings from the cooking meats to add additional flavors.

The grill is about 12″ in diameter and stands 14″ tall with the lid on. Their are a number of accessories; griddles, wok tops, etc…

It is also extremely portable and comes with an awesome carrying case. The design of the grill is such that the stainless steel mesh stays cool to the touch throughout the cook. I’m pretty sure I could cook with the Cobb on top of a tablecloth / wooden table without an issue.

In any case, it is a very impressive product and I’m looking forward to see how it fairs cooking meats and baking breads. It should prove ideal for cooking for my family, which is convenient given that my kitchen is currently destroyed in the process of a remodel.

Frankly, I knew nothing about The Cobb prior to tracing back the comment Tom made originally. I still know little about Art Fleederman other than that their online presence is both a bit campy and very interesting. The handful of communication I have had with Tom and with the company has been pleasant and responsive.

Art Fleederman carries what appears to be the complete line of Cobb grills and accessories. I’m very likely going to order the roasting rack soon.

Recently, we have been experiencing a bit of appliance stupidity in our house.

Replacement parts for our refrigerator seem to be a major profit center for GE and our microwave was clearly designed by jackasses.

Read on for many too many details.

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From the press release, this device contains features such as “a 28-in-1 media card reader, front IO, USB and fire wire connections, dual NTSC and HDTV tuners (with CableCARD shipping soon), 8 channel HD audio”, etc.etc.etc…

Sounds neat enough. Especially with the six terabytes of potential storage. Put some decent multimedia control software on it and… well.. not bad!

Except who the hell designed it? Clearly not someone who actually thought through how to use it!

Anything that sticks out at all from any of those “front IO” ports is going to obscure the screen! Can you imagine trying to download photos or video with your video camera balanced somewhere — because, most likely, this behemoth will be inside a big old media center cabinet — while trying to deal with a touchy/feely UI with cables constantly flopping on the screen?

And, of course, you’ll probably want to plug in a keyboard and/or mouse to be abel to properly annotate and edit whatever media you capture into said unit. That’ll be convenient.

I wonder if it is even smart enough to know not to open the DVD drawer when the screen is in the retracted position (assuming, of course, the screen retracts).

Before dealing with switches and debouncing switches, I wanted to add a second LED to the circuit.

Trivial:

#include <avr/io.h>
#include <util/delay.h>

int main(void) {
    DDRB = 255U; // Make all PB* -- PORT B -- pins output
    PORTB = 0x0; // turn all PB* -- PORT B -- pins off.

    while (1) {
        PORTB = 0x1; // B0 on, B1 off
        _delay_ms(200);
        PORTB |= 0x2; // B0 and B1 on
        _delay_ms(100);
        PORTB = 0x2; // B0 off, B1 on
        _delay_ms(200);
        PORTB = 0X0; // All off
        _delay_ms(2500); // 2.5 seconds off
    }
}

Each on/off port is represented by a single bit. So, each of the pins in PORTA, PORTB, PORTC, or PORTD — assuming they are in straight digital input/output mode and whatever AVR chip you are targeting has enough pins to have 4 port sets — will be controlled by a single bit in one of four bytes.

Clearly, some macros to toggle bits are in order. Now, it turns out that macros to toggle bits are a big source of contention amongst the AVR development community. They hide too much magic, or so they say, and, if you are going to be programming embedded systems, you ought to be comfortable with C level bit twiddling, damnit.

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The EMSL Target Board is built around the ATmega 168 micro-controller (same controller as the Arduino — which, frankly, I couldn’t care less about other than as a source of knowledge…).

It is an extremely easy to use and surprisingly powerful micro-controller. If it weren’t so convenient, I wouldn’t be writing this.

Seriously. If you have any interest in screwing around with micro-controllers, there is little excuse not to dive in now. It is cheap, easy, and powerful.

Beyond the EMSL Target Board, you’ll also need a Lady Ada USBTinyISP programmer that has been appropriately patched (when assembled).

First, grab and install AVR Mac Pack from the fine folks at Objective Development (same source of LaunchBar and Little Snitch — both awesome products in their own right).

AVR Mac Pack has everything needed to talk to the AVR, a compiler that can target the AVR, and support for Xcode based development.

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