Archive for the 'Industrial Design' Category

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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Ben picked up a ton of SIP machine pin sockets from Halted recently.

I grabbed about 200 from him and populated my EMSL Atmega target board with enough to provide for both on-board prototyping and to easily break out to a bread, board when needed.

Each point accepts a 24 gauge (or so) wire quite nicely. Makes for easy prototyping while not obscuring the documentation silkscreen on the board.

Next up?

I have all the parts needed to replace an entire flipper circuit in any modern Williams/Bally pinball machine.

Thus, I should have enough parts to drive a solenoid or flash-lamp from the AVR micro-controller.

First, though, I’ll flash some LEDs in response to button presses, though. All one voltage and relatively little chance of blowing up chips, bulbs, or shocking myself.

Once that works, I’ll wire up higher voltage / current drivers. I figure I ought to be able to both replace the flipper drivers with a much more maintainable system while also adding some automatic diagnostics that will light some LEDs inside the pinball when the flippers need to be rebuilt or maintained.

The folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories whipped up an elegant little kit that includes an ATmega168 AVR Micro-controller, 4 or 5 discrete components, and a circuit board.

The Atmel AVR micro-controllers are awesome. They cross three particular barriers to entry that I arbitrarily chose prior to screwing around with micro-controllers.

Specifically:

• Price: $10 per useful part The Atmel series ranges from less than $1/part to a bit north of $10/part for the über-deluxe controllers. The ATmega168 in this kit can be had for less than $5/each and includes 23 I/O lines (6 of which can be used for ADC), 16K of program memory, and can run up at speeds up to 20MHZ.
• USB based Programmer less than $50 LadyAda sells a simple USB programmer (based on the Atmel chips — it implements a USB stack in software!) for $22. It works great, once you fix this particular bug (which involves replacing two resistors with wires; not hard).
• Easy & Powerful Programmability (on a Mac) Code for the Atmel series of chips is written in C and compiled quite easily via gcc. The ObDev folks have made an easy to install package available. It just works. Better, the chips support in system programming (without sacrificing pins for I/O!) and, thus, “build and run” in Xcode re-loads the code on the target chip without having to either power down the board or remove the chip from the circuit. Edit-compile-run is very very fast.

  The code, itself, is pretty straightforward. The header files provide all the #defines needed to deal with all the random I/O based hardware functionality quite straightforward. The chips, themselves, are exceptionally flexible, with the ability to reconfigure what pins do what in software.

  The hardest part is remembering which pin maps to what random #define’d symbol.

  

  The Atmel chips are, in fact, the same chips (almost the same exact chip — the proto boards use a slightly less expensive part in that it doesn’t have quite as many I/O ports) used in the Peggy Board (also from EMSL). I picked up the ladyada programmer and grabbed the source from EMSL.

  I had simple animation up and running within a couple of hours, most of that time being consumed by dealing with the now fixed USBTiny programmer bug. Not much longer after that and I had a pretty neat line based animation.

  Jamie over at Noise Land Arcade else has grabbed the code and made a neat animated pacman sign (video here).

Which brings me to this kit: This credit card sized board is designed quite specifically for prototyping ATmega168 (and several others) based projects. Beyond including a bit of room for adding a couple of 8-pin DIPs (or other random components), the silk screen fully documents the various mnemonics associated with each pin.

First project?

I’m going to build modern style flipper replacement for ’80s and early ’90s Williams/Bally pinball machines. The old school flippers require more maintenance and tend to fail gracelessly, taking out other discrete components upon failure.

This board is total overkill. I really only need an 8 pin Atmel controller per flipper; maybe one chip for both flippers, if I optimize.

But at $9/each for the board, controller and discrete components (including shipping and CA tax) in lots of 10, I might just stick with building it out on the EMSL prototype board.

As with many EMSL projects, everything is open source. The board is single sided and easy to etch, but silk screening on the various documentation bits would be difficult.