"As you can see from the picture above of my Radeon HD5870 sitting on my HD4890, the end plate is more than capable of being held on without wood screws."
Anyone care to explain what the heck we're looking at in this picture? I see what looks like a poor video capture of a couple of video cards, but I can't make out anything relevant.
Maybe this guy has a point, but it's damn hard to see what he's talking about from the pictures. The only one that I agree looks bogus is the one where the board is cut flush with the edge of the housing. It does indeed look like it was cut straight through some things that shouldn't have been cut.
This guy also ignores the fact that surface mount connectors have been commonplace for many years now. The fact that there are no pins protruding through the board means nothing. I agree that it's unlikely that's the case here, but except for that last one, his pictures do a very poor job of backing up his claims. The DVI connector looks fine to me, unless there's a higher resolution version out there I'm not seeing.
I've certainly built working prototypes that looked considerably worse than this. I've got one on my bench now with an SOIC hot-glued to the board and connected by 30 AWG fly wires. I've soldered SMT connectors onto through-hole pads, put SOD-123 diodes on an SMB footprint, drilled extra holes in boards, bent gull-wing parts to fit J-lead footprints, and all sorts of other nasty kludges.
The alternative is wasting days or weeks waiting for new boards or the right parts that could be spent testing the hardware and debugging firmware.
Yes, this is probably a mock-up. Yes, they probably over-hyped and misrepresented it. Is anyone surprised? And does it make any real difference?
I guess this shouldn't surprise me here, where people seem to think that a great idea is all you need to be successful. (It isn't.)
Having the superior product doesn't count for anything if people don't know about it. I'm quite confident that my products are better than my competitors', but one competitor in particular was first to market and gained so much name recognition that many people don't even realize there IS an alternative. I don't *like* having to pay for ads, but it works, if you're smart about it anyway.
I *stopped* advertising on one popular site because Google's targeting was way off - my ads were getting lost in a sea of garbage ads that had no place on that site, and were causing the users to ignore everything as irrelevant. My sales went up immediately when I moved that budget elsewhere.
So yes, I would happily pay more to have my ads presented only to very specific categories of users, especially if it meant an overall thinning out of the quantity of ads thrown at them. I don't want to waste money spraying ads everywhere - I want them in front of people already looking for something I offer, or who have a need that they didn't know there was a specific product to fill.
As a consumer, if I have to see ads I'd much rather they be for embedded C compilers, test equipment, and scuba gear than cosmetics, luxury cars, and heartburn medication. Every once in a while I *do* come across something I could really use that I didn't know existed. This happens almost exclusively with ads in magazines like Circuit Cellar, though - where the ads are, of course, targeted.
As for American consumers not wanting targeted ads, maybe they should ask in a different way. Put someone in front of the TV for 30 minutes with the usual mix of ads for feminine products, pet food, dandruff shampoo, and so on. Then try another 30 minutes with ads targeted to their specific interests. Then ask them which they'd rather see every day.
I tend to do this too (except I get really screwed up in the southern hemisphere), but I can fully understand the part about conflicting mental maps.
There's a campground out in the Mojave desert that I've been going to since I was little. Just over the ridge from the campground is a canyon that ends in a (usually dry) waterfall.
For years I'd tried to find a way down. Even after I learned how to rappel I decided it was too risky. And then, while out hiking one day, I somehow wound up off by 90 degrees in my mental map and thought I was somewhere else entirely when I came across a waterfall.
I looked it over for a few seconds, climbed down, and went on my way. Didn't realize for several minutes that it was the same waterfall I'd failed to find a way down for years.
The influence of that map in my head is apparently so strong that when I thought I was somewhere else, I saw the waterfall in a completely different way. If you'd just dropped me there I'd have immediately realized where I was, but having been off-course for a mile or two I'd generated a new branch on my map of the canyon and was absolutely convinced I was somewhere else.
That 'other' branch of the canyon is still there in my mental map. I know it's wrong, but it's still in there.
The altitude limit isn't universal, and seems to be dependent on how the manufacturer reads the regs. Off the top of my head, I know the Garmin GPS 18 and 18x (with current firmware) and the Trimble Copernicus work at over 100,000'. As far as I know, nothing from SiRF does unless you have special firmware, and good luck getting those guys to even talk to you. Here's a table with some test results:
I use the GPS 18x myself, but that's mostly because I stock them and in Garmin binary mode I get high resolution Z velocity data which I can use to monitor ascent rate. You can get by with something lighter and cheaper.
It's great that they were able to use a cheap phone for this, but it's worth noting that many (probably most, in my experience) GPS receivers will NOT work properly above 60,000 feet. Some stop reporting their position until they come back down, some just report the wrong altitude, and some lock up completely. As long as you don't get one in that last category it's usually good enough for recovery, but you really need to do some research first if you want accurate tracking through the whole flight.
And ham gear doesn't need to be expensive. You can use a $20 surplus radio from eBay (I used a Radio Shack HTX-202) and a tracker kit (the radio modem part) is under $40.
I've got a new payload sitting here ready to go that's a lot cleaner and simpler, and has a 2-hour video capacity. Everything in the payload is off the shelf (granted, the radio/tracker is off my own shelf, it's one of my company's products) except for a DB9 connector and a few wires that took a few minutes to solder together. The housing is the top half of a magnum wine shipper, and all of the components (battery, radio, GPS) just wedge in between the foam pieces intended to hold the neck of the bottle. The camcorder is held in with rubber bands:
The acrylic window that goes over the end took me about 3 minutes to fabricate on a CNC milling machine and could be easily and cheaply replicated.
It'd be cheaper to build a transmit-only version of this system, but having a receiver lets you do useful stuff like control a cutdown device. This particular payload doesn't have one yet, but it can be as simple as a 1-watt resistor that you drive at 3 watts for several seconds to melt through a Nylon or Spectra cord. Maybe an extra buck worth of hardware.
I might launch this thing as soon as next month if I can find the time. Possibly from the Mojave desert again, or maybe from the Cuyama Valley, a little closer to home. Ground crew and chase team volunteers are always welcome.
At some point I'd like to have a ready-to-fly kit to sell at a reasonable price to schools, along with enough instructional materials to get them started. I just don't have the time for it right now.
Most of the films are rated for temperatures close to room temperature, though you can get other ranges. I've used through-hole resistors as heating elements before and they do indeed work quite well. A 1-watt metal film resistor will generate enough heat at 3 watts to melt its own solder joints. Long before that happens, it gets hot enough to melt through nylon or spectra, which is what I was using it for - a thermal knife for a load release.
It's certainly not going to be done in time this year, but maybe next. What actually inspired me was upgrading my desktop CNC milling machine's spindle motor so that it can handle cutting brass easily. I cut a few test shapes and I love it - it machines easily and looks beautiful.
I'm not really into steampunk, but I love some of the design elements. I'm working on a costume for next year that's sort of golden age of science fiction inspired, somewhere between Battlestar Galactica and a WWII German officer's uniform. I love the idea of a slightly bulky, machined brass wristwatch on a big leather band that's obviously electronic but clearly not a display technology in common real-world use, and I think it'll go well with the outfit.
I was thinking about making a thermochromic display for a custom watch, actually. Didn't know if anyone else had tried it before, but I guess I'm on the right track. It's going to take a lot of batteries to power, but I only really want it to run for Burning Man and Maker Faire.
I'm going to see if I can screen print resistive ink onto a PCB to make the heating elements. Failing that, I'll just go with thin film SMT resistors. Anyone know if that has been done before?
Those numbers seem to ignore the cost of producing corn vs. oil. What the farmer's interested in is profit, not gross revenue. Still, assuming it costs $50/barrel to produce and sells for, say, $53/barrel, you're still at $1428 profit per acre.
Or if OPEC opens the floodgates and drops the price to $35/barrel, you're out $7140/acre. But I suppose that's what the futures market is for.
Damn, the industry's really improved since I got out, then. I worked as a PC tech (mid '90s) at $5/hour (I used to make $5.50 as a dishwasher) when our billing rate was $65/hour. After a year at this 'starting' wage, my boss said I wasn't worth more than $5/hour to him because I wasn't a good enough salesman. No matter that we probably made more on service and I was a damn good technician.
Doug King, you're an asshole. A good businessman, but a first-rate asshole.
(Incidentally, this is the same man responsible for the fact that when you pull up to a McDonald's drive through in some places, you get a person in a call center via VoIP rather than someone actually in the restaurant.)
My girlfriend's mother is a school librarian, has been for decades. One day she was sorting through a stack of old books and came across a Bradbury book in which someone had scribbled across the title page in pen. I think it was actually as she was in the process of slamming her DISCARD stamp down on the book that she belatedly recognized the scribble as the author's signature.
She's normally got a good sense of humor, but she does NOT like it when you remind her about that dang Bradbury kid scribbling in her books.
I paid $20 for an old Motorola V400 on eBay. Quad band GSM and unlocked, so it works in most countries - I've had local SIM cards for Croatia, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Sound quality, battery life, and reliability are way better than my expensive Samsung SCH-i760 smart phone.
I was ready to smash the Samsung after the one time I called 911 on it. The 911 call worked, but it got stuck in emergency mode and it took at least two complete reboots before I could get the thing to make regular calls again. As soon as the contract's up I'm ditching it and going to the simplest phone they've got - I'd use the V400 as my primary phone but GSM coverage sucks where I live.
Try PSK31 (31.25 bps binary phase shift keying mode used for ham radio) with a couple of sound cards. It'll work over open air with a speaker and microphone. If you used two different carrier tones, you could probably do full duplex.
For my own implementation of PSK31, I once ran it at a carrier of 62.5 hz. Sounded more like war drums than a digital mode over my subwoofer, but it still decoded OK.
So with all of this attention to design, how did they screw up the usability so badly?
Show me ONE kid under 13 who, when presented with a closed XO-1, can get it open in under 3 minutes and who doesn't first remove the battery accidentally. For that matter, show me an adult who can do that. My girlfriend just tried the other night and I had to show her how. It took me a few minutes to figure out, and I took the battery off first, too.
As for the software, why the HELL is there not a consistent 'close' button across all applications?
I really WANTED to believe that this was going to be the slick, intuitive device that everyone said it would be. I tried to make allowances for the fact that it was still in development and might have some rough edges. But after a couple of days of playing with it (my kids gave up in under an hour) I had to admit that the overall user experience was just awful. I could give my kids a Commodore 64 with a text menu based interface to load a few programs (games, word processor, educational stuff, doodle, etc) and they'd have a better time with it than with the XO-1 and Sugar.
I was all for this project until I actually got my hands on the hardware. Only my piece of crap Windows Mobile based smart phone annoys me more than the XO-1, and that's mostly because I'm asking more of it. At least it has a consistent 'close' button, even if it doesn't really kill programs.
It was less invasive and less painful than some procedures I've had in the dentist's (or oral surgeon's) chair.
You can always freeze sperm beforehand if you're worried about reversability.
No one 'cuts your balls'. It's two little cuts in your scrotum under local anesthetic (granted, I didn't care for the injections but it was still better than the dentist) and a few minutes of tying and snipping. I spent the requisite weekend with a bag of frozen peas in my pants afterward, but I didn't even have any significant post-operative pain.
I'm not a super macho guy by any means (come on, I'm posting on Slashdot) but it didn't bother me at all to watch the whole procedure in a mirror.
Male injections aside, birth control usually means asking your SO to mess with their hormones and endure any side effects. Vasectomy isn't perfect, but it's easy, reliable, and has minimal long-term side effects.
I posted a Craigslist job listing (in an area with no Craigslist region of its own and relatively little local usage of the adjoining regions) for a 10-15 hour per week packing and shipping job at a buck an hour over minimum wage and had 75 resumes in 3 days, with most of those applicants willing to commute 15 miles or more for 2-3 hours of work a day!
As it turned out, just having 75 applicants doesn't mean it's easy to find someone who will actually show up on time, follow simple directions, and actually remember when I tell them three times in the same week that UPS next-day air packages always go in the express envelopes if they'll fit.
I think next time I try, I'm going to add some simple qualifying test, like "tell me what the USPS first class international rate is for an 8-ounce package going to the Czech Republic." That way I can just throw out all of the cut-and-paste responses that didn't even read the whole listing. I will most certainly include a note that when I say to email or fax and not call or visit, that means that a call or visit will automatically take you OUT of the running for the job.
So yeah, really really bad signal to noise ratio, even without $10M on the line.
In the embedded world, of course, you still get to use most of these tricks. Not to mention all sorts of low-level hardware hacks. I've written about that here before, but what I find really interesting is that despite the general trend toward ever-faster and more powerful embedded processors, there's at least one new core out there that's SMALLER than its 1970s predecessors.
Freescale's (relatively) new RS08 core is absolutely Spartan. IIRC, the directly addressable memory is 256 bytes. Everything beyond that requires paging. No index register, but it's emulated with a couple of RAM locations. Some single-byte instructions act on only a 4 or 5 bit address space. The advantage of all this minimalism is that the parts can cost under 50 cents each.
So not only is there still some need for all of the old tricks, but there are opportunities to learn NEW ugly hacks! I'm sure someone can come up with something suitably mind-blowing with an addressable index register and a processor architecture that supports self-modifying code.
How about industrial hardware? You'll probably pay at least twice as much as you would for a consumer desktop, but PCs made for industrial control applications tend to be a lot more rugged and build to serve for many years in harsh conditions. Sounds like you don't need a lot of processing power, so you could probably get by with a fanless system and eliminate a major failure (and noise) source.
I haven't bought anything from these guys, so I don't personally know anything about their quality, but SuperLogics has a barebones fanless Atom-based system for $315. Something like that might be a good start.
I agree with the $50,000+ price tag if you're looking to have someone else do everything.
As for building it in the US, have you tried? It *can* be done, but it seems to keep getting more difficult. I do have some PCBs assembled in the US, even though I could have them done in China for less. But for stuff like injection molded cables, I've gotten prices of $8+ each in the US when I can get them for around $1.50 in China. I'm willing to pay 50% to 100% more to keep production in the US, but 500%+ is a little hard to swallow.
There are also independent QA providers that operate in China who (for a price) will keep a close eye on outsourced manufacturing, and it's their job to know all of the little tricks the factories like to pull.
Most of the service-related companies I use in the US (printing, PCB assembly, metal fabrication, axial component sequencing) are small, usually family-owned businesses. They're the only ones who have been able to offer the prices and level of service that make it worth paying a premium for. And too many of the big companies, through arrogance or apathy, won't even touch something a little out of the ordinary. They're like the kids working at McDonald's - if it's not on one of the buttons in front of them, they can't do it.
Depends a lot on the exact value of 'mass market' and the sales potential. Really, a lot of this can be done with contract labor. Once the design is done, there are plenty of places out there (many of them reputable outfits that aren't likely to swipe your IP, even) that can handle component sourcing, injection molding, assembly, and even fulfillment.
Marketing should absolutely not be neglected. Us nerds tend to underestimate (or simply find distasteful) the amount of marketing and promotion that needs to be done to make a product successful.
In this case, I think building a working prototype needs to be the first step, and then you've got something more than just big ideas if you do go looking for partners or VC.
And I have to point out that not everyone WANTS an IPO. The best thing about owning my own company is that I don't have to answer to anyone except my customers. Investors are the last thing I want right now. Yeah, I'll probably never become a billionaire with a privately held company, but I could be happy enough as a millionaire. I have simple tastes; I just want a nice house somewhere, an airstrip, and a T-38 Talon with a Robotech paint job.
Good luck getting source code from Chinese companies. I've tried a few times, and even with a company that I already buy tens of thousands of dollars of equipment from, the answer has always been an emphatic 'no'.
In some cases, the problem may be that the source code isn't theirs. Take two way radios, for example. There are many, many different models on the market that all share the same basic firmware. Each of the companies licenses it from one design house, probably along with some of the hardware designs, too.
It's often hard to tell who's even a manufacturer and who's just a trading company, unless you go and personally tour the factory. Even then they can make it difficult to figure out who's who.
Where I HAVE had a measure of success is in buying partial products. For example, if you look on SparkFun Electronics' website, you'll see a weather sensor assembly. I bought those from a weather station manufacturer in China, and since their usual wireless interface wasn't FCC approved and wasn't needed for my application anyway, I negotiated a deal to buy the bare sensors at a significantly reduced price that still gives them enough extra profit margin to make it worth the hassle (the unneeded touch screen display is the expensive part), while still being far cheaper than designing and producing my own hardware. The reason they're at SparkFun now is that I'm way behind schedule on designing my own electronics package and I got tired of them taking up warehouse space, and sold part of the lot at wholesale.
The good news is that lots of Chinese companies are basically family-owned, and you CAN sometimes get through to the people who make the decisions, where with US companies you might not. But again, I've never had any success getting firmware source (even relatively simple stuff that I could recreate myself in a week) from any of them. Cable assemblies, housings, and so forth, sure. But not a single line of code.
If you're serious about making it happen, consider catching a flight to Hong Kong next month. The Hong Kong Electronics Fair, electronicAsia, and the China Sourcing Fair are all there at the same time around the 12-16th, and the massive Canton Fair (this will be my first year there) is right after that in Guangzhou, but that takes a little more planning.
Just showing up in person and leaving business cards (bring a few hundred, seriously) will get you much better responses later in email. They know you're serious enough to make the trip, at least. That was a benefit I hadn't foreseen my first trip. Also, allow a couple of days extra after the fairs for meetings with vendors if you do make some good contacts.
Also, one book I've found particularly useful in understanding the business culture in China is "The Essential Guide for Buying from China's Manufacturers" by James Lord, ISBN 1419628461. Wish I'd read that before my first trip there. (Tip: Beware the phrase "no problem". =])
If you do make it to Hong Kong, drop me a note and I'll meet you for a beer some time.
Then again, some of us are very well aware of it and just don't care so much. If I want to post thoughts to a blog that I don't want linked back to me (and I've done so in the past), I'll set up something entirely separate, with a name I've never used before, linked to a new gmail account.
Anyone with half a brain can figure out exactly who I am, where I live, and what I do for a living, starting from this post, in about 20 seconds. Medical conditions and sexual preference might take a little more work, but I'm sure some of it is out there.
Frankly, I don't care. I'm self-employed and don't worry about what an employer might think of me. My friends and family seem to like me well enough despite already knowing that stuff. So long as it's not information that's going to result in identity theft (account numbers and such), there's not much that's worth the effort to conceal.
I hired my first employee about two months ago. I chose him over 70 other applicants (he was my second choice, #1 got an offer with more hours from someone else) largely because his experience with music and computers told me that he was a creative person with a good attitude, which I thought was important despite the fact that the job is not a particularly technical one.
Turns out that creativity doesn't automatically translate to an ability to follow verbal directions, pay attention to detail, and work efficiently without supervision. He's getting better, but his work's still not quite up to par.
Next time I think I'll be looking for a different set of qualifications. Maybe I'll have to give more weight to other keywords, like "varsity cheerleading." If I'm going to pay someone to work slowly and make costly mistakes, they should at least be easy on the eyes. =]
Generally true. Sometimes clever is necessary, though. I do most of my programming these days on embedded systems, where size and speed are absolutely critical. I'll occasionally do something horribly non-standard and convoluted (usually to avoid writing even more annoying inline assembly code), but I've learned to allow about a 3-to-1 comment to code ratio in those cases. Even something not that complicated but just unusual (casting a char array to a function pointer and calling it because that particular buffer is the only one available to hold the flash programming code that has to be copied down to RAM, for example) warrants a clear, concise description of what the hell is going on.
No matter how sure I am that I'll remember how something works and why I did it, I still try to always comment it. I'm sure everyone here (who's been programming for more than 3 years anyway) has gone back to code they wrote 3 years ago and thought "what the hell is this, and what was I thinking?". In my experience that's usually followed by a quick correction, and then after a few hours of chasing down some obscure bug that subsequently appeared, remembering why you did that in the first place and putting it back the way it was.
Slashdot Mirror
"As you can see from the picture above of my Radeon HD5870 sitting on my HD4890, the end plate is more than capable of being held on without wood screws."
Anyone care to explain what the heck we're looking at in this picture? I see what looks like a poor video capture of a couple of video cards, but I can't make out anything relevant.
Maybe this guy has a point, but it's damn hard to see what he's talking about from the pictures. The only one that I agree looks bogus is the one where the board is cut flush with the edge of the housing. It does indeed look like it was cut straight through some things that shouldn't have been cut.
This guy also ignores the fact that surface mount connectors have been commonplace for many years now. The fact that there are no pins protruding through the board means nothing. I agree that it's unlikely that's the case here, but except for that last one, his pictures do a very poor job of backing up his claims. The DVI connector looks fine to me, unless there's a higher resolution version out there I'm not seeing.
I've certainly built working prototypes that looked considerably worse than this. I've got one on my bench now with an SOIC hot-glued to the board and connected by 30 AWG fly wires. I've soldered SMT connectors onto through-hole pads, put SOD-123 diodes on an SMB footprint, drilled extra holes in boards, bent gull-wing parts to fit J-lead footprints, and all sorts of other nasty kludges.
The alternative is wasting days or weeks waiting for new boards or the right parts that could be spent testing the hardware and debugging firmware.
Yes, this is probably a mock-up. Yes, they probably over-hyped and misrepresented it. Is anyone surprised? And does it make any real difference?
I guess this shouldn't surprise me here, where people seem to think that a great idea is all you need to be successful. (It isn't.)
Having the superior product doesn't count for anything if people don't know about it. I'm quite confident that my products are better than my competitors', but one competitor in particular was first to market and gained so much name recognition that many people don't even realize there IS an alternative. I don't *like* having to pay for ads, but it works, if you're smart about it anyway.
I *stopped* advertising on one popular site because Google's targeting was way off - my ads were getting lost in a sea of garbage ads that had no place on that site, and were causing the users to ignore everything as irrelevant. My sales went up immediately when I moved that budget elsewhere.
So yes, I would happily pay more to have my ads presented only to very specific categories of users, especially if it meant an overall thinning out of the quantity of ads thrown at them. I don't want to waste money spraying ads everywhere - I want them in front of people already looking for something I offer, or who have a need that they didn't know there was a specific product to fill.
As a consumer, if I have to see ads I'd much rather they be for embedded C compilers, test equipment, and scuba gear than cosmetics, luxury cars, and heartburn medication. Every once in a while I *do* come across something I could really use that I didn't know existed. This happens almost exclusively with ads in magazines like Circuit Cellar, though - where the ads are, of course, targeted.
As for American consumers not wanting targeted ads, maybe they should ask in a different way. Put someone in front of the TV for 30 minutes with the usual mix of ads for feminine products, pet food, dandruff shampoo, and so on. Then try another 30 minutes with ads targeted to their specific interests. Then ask them which they'd rather see every day.
I tend to do this too (except I get really screwed up in the southern hemisphere), but I can fully understand the part about conflicting mental maps.
There's a campground out in the Mojave desert that I've been going to since I was little. Just over the ridge from the campground is a canyon that ends in a (usually dry) waterfall.
For years I'd tried to find a way down. Even after I learned how to rappel I decided it was too risky. And then, while out hiking one day, I somehow wound up off by 90 degrees in my mental map and thought I was somewhere else entirely when I came across a waterfall.
I looked it over for a few seconds, climbed down, and went on my way. Didn't realize for several minutes that it was the same waterfall I'd failed to find a way down for years.
The influence of that map in my head is apparently so strong that when I thought I was somewhere else, I saw the waterfall in a completely different way. If you'd just dropped me there I'd have immediately realized where I was, but having been off-course for a mile or two I'd generated a new branch on my map of the canyon and was absolutely convinced I was somewhere else.
That 'other' branch of the canyon is still there in my mental map. I know it's wrong, but it's still in there.
My last launch covered 100 miles / 160 kilometers, so yeah, you might want to bring your passport with you if you launch from Great Britain!
Hi Bruce! You going to DCC this month?
The altitude limit isn't universal, and seems to be dependent on how the manufacturer reads the regs. Off the top of my head, I know the Garmin GPS 18 and 18x (with current firmware) and the Trimble Copernicus work at over 100,000'. As far as I know, nothing from SiRF does unless you have special firmware, and good luck getting those guys to even talk to you. Here's a table with some test results:
http://showcase.netins.net/web/wallio/GPSrcvrsvs60kft.htm
I use the GPS 18x myself, but that's mostly because I stock them and in Garmin binary mode I get high resolution Z velocity data which I can use to monitor ascent rate. You can get by with something lighter and cheaper.
Scott
N1VG
It's great that they were able to use a cheap phone for this, but it's worth noting that many (probably most, in my experience) GPS receivers will NOT work properly above 60,000 feet. Some stop reporting their position until they come back down, some just report the wrong altitude, and some lock up completely. As long as you don't get one in that last category it's usually good enough for recovery, but you really need to do some research first if you want accurate tracking through the whole flight.
And ham gear doesn't need to be expensive. You can use a $20 surplus radio from eBay (I used a Radio Shack HTX-202) and a tracker kit (the radio modem part) is under $40.
I think the hardware investment for my balloon project was about $300:
http://n1vg.net/balloon
I've got a new payload sitting here ready to go that's a lot cleaner and simpler, and has a 2-hour video capacity. Everything in the payload is off the shelf (granted, the radio/tracker is off my own shelf, it's one of my company's products) except for a DB9 connector and a few wires that took a few minutes to solder together. The housing is the top half of a magnum wine shipper, and all of the components (battery, radio, GPS) just wedge in between the foam pieces intended to hold the neck of the bottle. The camcorder is held in with rubber bands:
http://n1vg.net/images/payload1.jpg
http://n1vg.net/images/payload2.jpg
http://n1vg.net/images/payload3.jpg
The acrylic window that goes over the end took me about 3 minutes to fabricate on a CNC milling machine and could be easily and cheaply replicated.
It'd be cheaper to build a transmit-only version of this system, but having a receiver lets you do useful stuff like control a cutdown device. This particular payload doesn't have one yet, but it can be as simple as a 1-watt resistor that you drive at 3 watts for several seconds to melt through a Nylon or Spectra cord. Maybe an extra buck worth of hardware.
I might launch this thing as soon as next month if I can find the time. Possibly from the Mojave desert again, or maybe from the Cuyama Valley, a little closer to home. Ground crew and chase team volunteers are always welcome.
At some point I'd like to have a ready-to-fly kit to sell at a reasonable price to schools, along with enough instructional materials to get them started. I just don't have the time for it right now.
Most of the films are rated for temperatures close to room temperature, though you can get other ranges. I've used through-hole resistors as heating elements before and they do indeed work quite well. A 1-watt metal film resistor will generate enough heat at 3 watts to melt its own solder joints. Long before that happens, it gets hot enough to melt through nylon or spectra, which is what I was using it for - a thermal knife for a load release.
It's certainly not going to be done in time this year, but maybe next. What actually inspired me was upgrading my desktop CNC milling machine's spindle motor so that it can handle cutting brass easily. I cut a few test shapes and I love it - it machines easily and looks beautiful.
I'm not really into steampunk, but I love some of the design elements. I'm working on a costume for next year that's sort of golden age of science fiction inspired, somewhere between Battlestar Galactica and a WWII German officer's uniform. I love the idea of a slightly bulky, machined brass wristwatch on a big leather band that's obviously electronic but clearly not a display technology in common real-world use, and I think it'll go well with the outfit.
I was thinking about making a thermochromic display for a custom watch, actually. Didn't know if anyone else had tried it before, but I guess I'm on the right track. It's going to take a lot of batteries to power, but I only really want it to run for Burning Man and Maker Faire.
I'm going to see if I can screen print resistive ink onto a PCB to make the heating elements. Failing that, I'll just go with thin film SMT resistors. Anyone know if that has been done before?
Those numbers seem to ignore the cost of producing corn vs. oil. What the farmer's interested in is profit, not gross revenue. Still, assuming it costs $50/barrel to produce and sells for, say, $53/barrel, you're still at $1428 profit per acre.
Or if OPEC opens the floodgates and drops the price to $35/barrel, you're out $7140/acre. But I suppose that's what the futures market is for.
Damn, the industry's really improved since I got out, then. I worked as a PC tech (mid '90s) at $5/hour (I used to make $5.50 as a dishwasher) when our billing rate was $65/hour. After a year at this 'starting' wage, my boss said I wasn't worth more than $5/hour to him because I wasn't a good enough salesman. No matter that we probably made more on service and I was a damn good technician.
Doug King, you're an asshole. A good businessman, but a first-rate asshole.
(Incidentally, this is the same man responsible for the fact that when you pull up to a McDonald's drive through in some places, you get a person in a call center via VoIP rather than someone actually in the restaurant.)
My girlfriend's mother is a school librarian, has been for decades. One day she was sorting through a stack of old books and came across a Bradbury book in which someone had scribbled across the title page in pen. I think it was actually as she was in the process of slamming her DISCARD stamp down on the book that she belatedly recognized the scribble as the author's signature.
She's normally got a good sense of humor, but she does NOT like it when you remind her about that dang Bradbury kid scribbling in her books.
I paid $20 for an old Motorola V400 on eBay. Quad band GSM and unlocked, so it works in most countries - I've had local SIM cards for Croatia, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Sound quality, battery life, and reliability are way better than my expensive Samsung SCH-i760 smart phone.
I was ready to smash the Samsung after the one time I called 911 on it. The 911 call worked, but it got stuck in emergency mode and it took at least two complete reboots before I could get the thing to make regular calls again. As soon as the contract's up I'm ditching it and going to the simplest phone they've got - I'd use the V400 as my primary phone but GSM coverage sucks where I live.
Try PSK31 (31.25 bps binary phase shift keying mode used for ham radio) with a couple of sound cards. It'll work over open air with a speaker and microphone. If you used two different carrier tones, you could probably do full duplex.
For my own implementation of PSK31, I once ran it at a carrier of 62.5 hz. Sounded more like war drums than a digital mode over my subwoofer, but it still decoded OK.
So with all of this attention to design, how did they screw up the usability so badly?
Show me ONE kid under 13 who, when presented with a closed XO-1, can get it open in under 3 minutes and who doesn't first remove the battery accidentally. For that matter, show me an adult who can do that. My girlfriend just tried the other night and I had to show her how. It took me a few minutes to figure out, and I took the battery off first, too.
As for the software, why the HELL is there not a consistent 'close' button across all applications?
I really WANTED to believe that this was going to be the slick, intuitive device that everyone said it would be. I tried to make allowances for the fact that it was still in development and might have some rough edges. But after a couple of days of playing with it (my kids gave up in under an hour) I had to admit that the overall user experience was just awful. I could give my kids a Commodore 64 with a text menu based interface to load a few programs (games, word processor, educational stuff, doodle, etc) and they'd have a better time with it than with the XO-1 and Sugar.
I was all for this project until I actually got my hands on the hardware. Only my piece of crap Windows Mobile based smart phone annoys me more than the XO-1, and that's mostly because I'm asking more of it. At least it has a consistent 'close' button, even if it doesn't really kill programs.
It was less invasive and less painful than some procedures I've had in the dentist's (or oral surgeon's) chair.
You can always freeze sperm beforehand if you're worried about reversability.
No one 'cuts your balls'. It's two little cuts in your scrotum under local anesthetic (granted, I didn't care for the injections but it was still better than the dentist) and a few minutes of tying and snipping. I spent the requisite weekend with a bag of frozen peas in my pants afterward, but I didn't even have any significant post-operative pain.
I'm not a super macho guy by any means (come on, I'm posting on Slashdot) but it didn't bother me at all to watch the whole procedure in a mirror.
Male injections aside, birth control usually means asking your SO to mess with their hormones and endure any side effects. Vasectomy isn't perfect, but it's easy, reliable, and has minimal long-term side effects.
I posted a Craigslist job listing (in an area with no Craigslist region of its own and relatively little local usage of the adjoining regions) for a 10-15 hour per week packing and shipping job at a buck an hour over minimum wage and had 75 resumes in 3 days, with most of those applicants willing to commute 15 miles or more for 2-3 hours of work a day!
As it turned out, just having 75 applicants doesn't mean it's easy to find someone who will actually show up on time, follow simple directions, and actually remember when I tell them three times in the same week that UPS next-day air packages always go in the express envelopes if they'll fit.
I think next time I try, I'm going to add some simple qualifying test, like "tell me what the USPS first class international rate is for an 8-ounce package going to the Czech Republic." That way I can just throw out all of the cut-and-paste responses that didn't even read the whole listing. I will most certainly include a note that when I say to email or fax and not call or visit, that means that a call or visit will automatically take you OUT of the running for the job.
So yeah, really really bad signal to noise ratio, even without $10M on the line.
In the embedded world, of course, you still get to use most of these tricks. Not to mention all sorts of low-level hardware hacks. I've written about that here before, but what I find really interesting is that despite the general trend toward ever-faster and more powerful embedded processors, there's at least one new core out there that's SMALLER than its 1970s predecessors.
Freescale's (relatively) new RS08 core is absolutely Spartan. IIRC, the directly addressable memory is 256 bytes. Everything beyond that requires paging. No index register, but it's emulated with a couple of RAM locations. Some single-byte instructions act on only a 4 or 5 bit address space. The advantage of all this minimalism is that the parts can cost under 50 cents each.
So not only is there still some need for all of the old tricks, but there are opportunities to learn NEW ugly hacks! I'm sure someone can come up with something suitably mind-blowing with an addressable index register and a processor architecture that supports self-modifying code.
How about industrial hardware? You'll probably pay at least twice as much as you would for a consumer desktop, but PCs made for industrial control applications tend to be a lot more rugged and build to serve for many years in harsh conditions. Sounds like you don't need a lot of processing power, so you could probably get by with a fanless system and eliminate a major failure (and noise) source.
I haven't bought anything from these guys, so I don't personally know anything about their quality, but SuperLogics has a barebones fanless Atom-based system for $315. Something like that might be a good start.
I agree with the $50,000+ price tag if you're looking to have someone else do everything.
As for building it in the US, have you tried? It *can* be done, but it seems to keep getting more difficult. I do have some PCBs assembled in the US, even though I could have them done in China for less. But for stuff like injection molded cables, I've gotten prices of $8+ each in the US when I can get them for around $1.50 in China. I'm willing to pay 50% to 100% more to keep production in the US, but 500%+ is a little hard to swallow.
There are also independent QA providers that operate in China who (for a price) will keep a close eye on outsourced manufacturing, and it's their job to know all of the little tricks the factories like to pull.
Most of the service-related companies I use in the US (printing, PCB assembly, metal fabrication, axial component sequencing) are small, usually family-owned businesses. They're the only ones who have been able to offer the prices and level of service that make it worth paying a premium for. And too many of the big companies, through arrogance or apathy, won't even touch something a little out of the ordinary. They're like the kids working at McDonald's - if it's not on one of the buttons in front of them, they can't do it.
Depends a lot on the exact value of 'mass market' and the sales potential. Really, a lot of this can be done with contract labor. Once the design is done, there are plenty of places out there (many of them reputable outfits that aren't likely to swipe your IP, even) that can handle component sourcing, injection molding, assembly, and even fulfillment.
Marketing should absolutely not be neglected. Us nerds tend to underestimate (or simply find distasteful) the amount of marketing and promotion that needs to be done to make a product successful.
In this case, I think building a working prototype needs to be the first step, and then you've got something more than just big ideas if you do go looking for partners or VC.
And I have to point out that not everyone WANTS an IPO. The best thing about owning my own company is that I don't have to answer to anyone except my customers. Investors are the last thing I want right now. Yeah, I'll probably never become a billionaire with a privately held company, but I could be happy enough as a millionaire. I have simple tastes; I just want a nice house somewhere, an airstrip, and a T-38 Talon with a Robotech paint job.
Good luck getting source code from Chinese companies. I've tried a few times, and even with a company that I already buy tens of thousands of dollars of equipment from, the answer has always been an emphatic 'no'.
In some cases, the problem may be that the source code isn't theirs. Take two way radios, for example. There are many, many different models on the market that all share the same basic firmware. Each of the companies licenses it from one design house, probably along with some of the hardware designs, too.
It's often hard to tell who's even a manufacturer and who's just a trading company, unless you go and personally tour the factory. Even then they can make it difficult to figure out who's who.
Where I HAVE had a measure of success is in buying partial products. For example, if you look on SparkFun Electronics' website, you'll see a weather sensor assembly. I bought those from a weather station manufacturer in China, and since their usual wireless interface wasn't FCC approved and wasn't needed for my application anyway, I negotiated a deal to buy the bare sensors at a significantly reduced price that still gives them enough extra profit margin to make it worth the hassle (the unneeded touch screen display is the expensive part), while still being far cheaper than designing and producing my own hardware. The reason they're at SparkFun now is that I'm way behind schedule on designing my own electronics package and I got tired of them taking up warehouse space, and sold part of the lot at wholesale.
The good news is that lots of Chinese companies are basically family-owned, and you CAN sometimes get through to the people who make the decisions, where with US companies you might not. But again, I've never had any success getting firmware source (even relatively simple stuff that I could recreate myself in a week) from any of them. Cable assemblies, housings, and so forth, sure. But not a single line of code.
If you're serious about making it happen, consider catching a flight to Hong Kong next month. The Hong Kong Electronics Fair, electronicAsia, and the China Sourcing Fair are all there at the same time around the 12-16th, and the massive Canton Fair (this will be my first year there) is right after that in Guangzhou, but that takes a little more planning.
Just showing up in person and leaving business cards (bring a few hundred, seriously) will get you much better responses later in email. They know you're serious enough to make the trip, at least. That was a benefit I hadn't foreseen my first trip. Also, allow a couple of days extra after the fairs for meetings with vendors if you do make some good contacts.
Also, one book I've found particularly useful in understanding the business culture in China is "The Essential Guide for Buying from China's Manufacturers" by James Lord, ISBN 1419628461. Wish I'd read that before my first trip there. (Tip: Beware the phrase "no problem". =])
If you do make it to Hong Kong, drop me a note and I'll meet you for a beer some time.
scott@argentdata.com
Then again, some of us are very well aware of it and just don't care so much. If I want to post thoughts to a blog that I don't want linked back to me (and I've done so in the past), I'll set up something entirely separate, with a name I've never used before, linked to a new gmail account.
Anyone with half a brain can figure out exactly who I am, where I live, and what I do for a living, starting from this post, in about 20 seconds. Medical conditions and sexual preference might take a little more work, but I'm sure some of it is out there.
Frankly, I don't care. I'm self-employed and don't worry about what an employer might think of me. My friends and family seem to like me well enough despite already knowing that stuff. So long as it's not information that's going to result in identity theft (account numbers and such), there's not much that's worth the effort to conceal.
I hired my first employee about two months ago. I chose him over 70 other applicants (he was my second choice, #1 got an offer with more hours from someone else) largely because his experience with music and computers told me that he was a creative person with a good attitude, which I thought was important despite the fact that the job is not a particularly technical one.
Turns out that creativity doesn't automatically translate to an ability to follow verbal directions, pay attention to detail, and work efficiently without supervision. He's getting better, but his work's still not quite up to par.
Next time I think I'll be looking for a different set of qualifications. Maybe I'll have to give more weight to other keywords, like "varsity cheerleading." If I'm going to pay someone to work slowly and make costly mistakes, they should at least be easy on the eyes. =]
Generally true. Sometimes clever is necessary, though. I do most of my programming these days on embedded systems, where size and speed are absolutely critical. I'll occasionally do something horribly non-standard and convoluted (usually to avoid writing even more annoying inline assembly code), but I've learned to allow about a 3-to-1 comment to code ratio in those cases. Even something not that complicated but just unusual (casting a char array to a function pointer and calling it because that particular buffer is the only one available to hold the flash programming code that has to be copied down to RAM, for example) warrants a clear, concise description of what the hell is going on.
No matter how sure I am that I'll remember how something works and why I did it, I still try to always comment it. I'm sure everyone here (who's been programming for more than 3 years anyway) has gone back to code they wrote 3 years ago and thought "what the hell is this, and what was I thinking?". In my experience that's usually followed by a quick correction, and then after a few hours of chasing down some obscure bug that subsequently appeared, remembering why you did that in the first place and putting it back the way it was.