ALL ART BURNS

…or be glad that their neighbor did?”

Recently I picked up a Barnes and Noble NOOKColor. It’s an Android-based, e-reader/tablet with a good web browser and PDF display package. I don’t plan on buying many e-books (I prefer paper), but having something bigger than a phone and smaller than a laptop that can display a PDF or browse a “howto” site while I’m in the studio is seriously useful.

Except for one slight problem.

Like most tablets/e-readers, it’s meant to be hand-held and not parked on a bench. If I lay it flat on my bench it’s hard to read, and while it was amusing to have my hand model hold it, that didn’t work well either.

So after a frustrating day of trying to use it to browse instructions on some MakerBot mods…

[facepalm]

… a trivial NOOKColor holder.

[This is going to get a bit nerdy, but don’t worry, I save the hardcore stuff for my nerd blog.]

I had an idea recently for a different way of making ground plane antennas for the 2M band. Don’t worry about what they actually are, suffice it to say that they occupy a lot of volume and are a pain to transport. Imagine a pyramid made out of four 60cm coathangers with another 60cm coathanger coming out the top of the pyramid and you’ve got a typical ground plane antenna. On the other hand, they’re cheap, easy to build and can be tuned/adjusted with the SWR meter in a decent VHF radio.

(Ok, that’s pretty much all the geek stuff out of the way. See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?)

So here’s the problem. What if you want to toss a ground plane antenna in the back of your car, carry it somewhere on your bicycle, or have it as part of an emergency “go bag”? Are you really going to cart around a delicate bit of metal sculpture that occupies a rectangle a half-meter on each side and a meter tall? No, you aren’t.

This became a problem with an interesting combination of design and fabrication: How I could make it easier to transport and store but still be easy to set up and function correctly as an antenna? The idea of making it fold up seemed like the most obvious solution, but folding means moving parts which means more chance of coming apart. However, most people use this sort of antenna in a fixed location, often inside an attic or outside resting on a flat surface. At worst it might be used outside in windy situation and I’m thinking about a second version for that sort of environment. I started my process with the traditional sketching but instead of making foamcore models I decided to fire up the MakerBot Cupcake I built last winter and start out with ABS prototypes.

Total time spent modeling and printing each iteration was about an hour, and it was easy to fit that in at night after dinner over a few nights. The first few didn’t work very well but I quickly hit one that did work and that was a relatively simple piece of plastic. (Ok, it worked better after a bit of filing and sanding, but it worked.) Within a few minutes I’d bent and cut some welding rod, soldered a stick of it to an adapter, tweaked the resonance a bit, and I had a working antenna for not very much money.

The problem quickly became “How do I share this with other amateur radio operators?” Sure, I posted the STL on Thingiverse, but you have to own or know someone with a 3D printer for that to be of any use.

I think the answer is going to be Shapeways. I’ve ordered printed items from them in the past and while they aren’t cheap, they have wonderful print quality and ship worldwide. I’ve started the process of setting up a store there and in the spirit of Amateur Radio will offer my antenna mount for minimal markup.

In a few months we’ll see how this experiment worked: Can a design concept prototyped on a hobby 3D printer be turned around and sold for a small profit by a commercial fabrication shop? What are the unexpected surprises or hidden gotchas that need to be solved for this to be more than a hobby and instead a viable business model?

As documented earlier, complete this statement every year while limiting your answer to 15 words or less,

“I want to be a designer because …”

…I like finding and solving wicked problems, and design is full of them.

I’ve got a backlog of stuff to write about, including this really great book by Graham Pullin, “design meets disability”. Things have been hectic at The Job That Does Not Pay Me To Blog so it’s been hard finding the mental energy to be smart about non-work stuff.

Until yesterday, that is, when my partner tripped and broke several foot bones that are needed for things like walking and driving and the like. So not only are crutches involved, but we live in a two-story house with the bath upstairs, kitchen on the first floor, and laundry and storage in the basement.

We knew our 1950s house was nowhere close to ADA when we bought it, and we often joke about how ADA-hostile Pittsburgh is in general.

I guess now we’ll get some first-hand experience as to just how bad it is and what we — as designers — can do to help fix things.

On my recent trip to Japan I took my hand-me-down-but-new-to-me DSLR with the intent of documenting my trip and stuffing my swipe file to the brim. I didn’t take my video camera because it was too bulky and required too much attention: tapes that have to be managed, batteries to be charged and swapped, etc. Once I got there I quickly regretted not bringing the video camera and picked up a pocket-sized HD video camera, a Sony HDR-TGV5.

The DSLR is a great tool for documenting 2d and 3d design, but for 4d design you really need something that can capture video. (It’s true that some DSLRs now capture stunning video, but only for short durations and quantities and you’re still lugging around a full-size camera.) My “should have brought the video camera” regret kicked in as soon as I started experiencing how differently Japanese people interact with technology and their environment. Sure, I could take lots of photos and copious notes, but those aren’t nearly as good as 10-15 seconds of video.

It’s not just recording video that’s important, it’s being able to record video conveniently, in high quality, then easily move the video off the camera. With my full-size, miniDV video camera it’s pretty much impossible to take quick snippets of video given the overhead of getting it in/out of the case, turning it on, etc. On the other hand, the TGV5 is small and light enough that I can carry it in my pocket and within a few seconds have it out and recording video. (It’s even faster than getting my Droid out and recording.) Cheap/free software makes it trivial to take a 10-20 second clip, trim it if needed, then “Save As” for Flickr or Vimeo.

As an experiment I’m starting to document design — especially 4d design — using only short video clips. I’ve posted a couple of short clips to a new flickr set, “Japan + Design” which I’ll be filling with video and still clips as I get around to processing the backlog of photos.

There’s no chance of my getting rid of the DSLR any time soon as there’s no substitute for huge glass when it comes to taking good photos. However, I have stopped lugging it around unless I’m intentionally on a trip to take hiqh quality photos as the TGV5 is becoming my “go to” camera for documentation and swipe files.