…This time around, Hong Kong is clicking surprisingly well. Maybe it’s because I know that I’ll be leaving, and I don’t feel so invested and dismayed by the city’s shortcomings. Maybe my skin has thickened a bit and the things that rubbed me the wrong way now take a back seat and I can focus on some of the neatness in the city. And I’m finding a lot of it in Phase 1, Kwun Tong Industrial Center, where Shawn’s lab is. It’s a giant concrete industrial building in a giant concrete industrial area in Kowloon, and it’s a fractal microcosm of life. Friday night, Shawn and I were working late, and we took a dinner break around ten, and when we got back we took the elevator back up to the eighth floor, where the lab is, and there was a guy in the elevator about our age, carrying an INSANE amount of fireworks. I asked him in my stammering Cantonese what he was up to, and he said that he was headed up to the roof to shoot them off with some friends, and we could come. We popped back into the lab to drop off our bags and then sprinted up to the roof.
Kwun Tong Industrial Center is an old, crumbling building, dwarfed by the endless modern high rises that surround it, making their way like stoic soldiers up into the mountains that border Kowloon. The roof has one of the most dramatic views I’ve ever seen–it’s like a mix of bladerunner and 1984 and every other imaginable mix of a dramatic futuristic megacity and distopic future. The kleig lights blast down from the skyscrapers and construction cranes, lighting everything up like it’s noon, and even at midnight, the highway and sidewalks and trains below are in constant, dizzying motion.
And it’s onto this roof we climb in search of twenty-somethings with armfuls of high explosives. In the distance, on the other side of the roof, we vaguely see a couple people moving, so we head over there carrying the couple cans of beer we grabbed from the lab fridge. The roof is covered with rubble, abandoned machinery and construction bamboo, so it takes us a while to pick our way across. We climb over the last mossy concrete wall and find ourselves face to face with fifteen men wielding swords. There are shouts and a flurry of motion and more men rush out from the sidelines with bamboo, and they start fighting, sword on bamboo, whirling and jumping and thrusting and shouting ancient commands under the relentless floodlights and 24/7 helicopters heading to shenzhen.
Suddenly, it’s like one of those scenes where a cowboy walks into a bar and the piano player jerks to a stop and everyone looks over at the door in sudden silence. All these guys notice us and everyone’s holding swords and staffs and staring at us. We’re holding cans of beer and feel a wee bit exposed. I manage to stammer in Cantonese, “Hi. We’re from the eighth floor. We’re inventors.”
This breaks the ice a bit, and they go on sparring and practicing (as we find out) kung fu with one another. They’re Luo Hun Kung Fu practitioners, which I happen to have heard of only because the Luo Hun fighting monks are vegetarian, and it’s the only friggin vegetarian dish that you can order in any hong kong restaurant without a long negotiation, so we get to talking about food and fighting and one of the guys runs around us shadowboxing and thrusting his fists millimeters from our noses while shouting fiercely and we generally have ourselves a good old time.
And it’s the thing that I’m tasting about Hong Kong. At the street level, everything is dominated by money and commerce, and the life retreats up into the skyscrapers and rooftops and backrooms where it’s hidden from view, and walking around the city, you’d swear that everything is about money and speed, because that’s all you see, but every now and then, when you least expect it, you catch a glimpse of something very human and deep-rooted in the city, that extends beyond the overwhelming glut of capitalism that’s barfing all over everything, and it’s that glimpse that gives me hope and makes me feel o.k. about Hong Kong. The more time I spend in the Industrial Center, the more glimpses I get of life tucked away into small corners, and the more I like it.
Hong Kong Story
April 18th, 2012a little bit of history
February 23rd, 2012Well, I was going through my old journals, and I found this gem. Written during a particularly boring Spanish lit class, spring 2007
I'm not a knight in shining armor
Mostly because my horse is a
bicycle made of trash
and I don't know where
I left my shoes
But there's a smile on my face
maybe that's enough
Nightswimming
January 31st, 2012Oh man. I wrote this poem in a 5am couch request to someone in Oklahoma City, and now I’m all in love with it. Quick! Publish it before I decide that it’s lame!
They say abandoned swimming pools are just for drunks and teenaged fools An eyesore, trainwreck, waste of space drained pimples on our city's face. But I say nothing, simply mourn that these pools are so damn forlorn. Once filled with screaming multitudes Summer pals and moonlit nudes Weekend heartbreak lifeguard's chair Sunlight streaming on a pair. Whistle out when lightning sounds Barbequeues and beer abound. The pool's endured throughout the years bare splayed footsteps; toddler's tears. But now it lies, dark drained and streaked Dirt lying where lovers sneaked. It's sentiment for seasons past that brought me towards tonight's repast. Wicker basket, tennis shoes black shirt dark hat jeans: dark blue. Hop a fence and walk alone darkened paths where moonlight shone. Down the ladder, gently pick, to share with this pool a pic-a-nic. Care for some wine? I'd like some too! What pleasure it is to dine with you. To see old friends from times long past Forgotten; the world moves so fast. But I won't let you lie alone I'll sit upon your lifeguard's throne. Whistles, laughter bring back good times White lips turned black with red wine. We're both casualties of some mindless putz progress, age and budget cuts. But tonight is ours to share we feast on cheese and balsam pears Let's make some noise, let's get retarded reMIND this city what it's discarded! Hurled cabernet on shower rooms fly high a flag to show the moon. Stereo and switch to beer slipstep falling on my rear. Howl at the moon, curse at the sky we're all that remember, you and I A tragedy; you know it's true... OK, officer, I'll come with you.
midnight designs
January 15th, 2012There’s a time when it’s 12:45 in the morning, you’re sitting in a bar somewhere on the pacific coast, and you’re getting introspective. You worry that you haven’t sold enough printed parts for the day, that people gave you too many drinks and not enough cash, and that you’re batting out of your league. You look over at your friends, exhausted from a long day, and you wish you could say something great. No words come, but your hands start moving of their own accord; they open your laptop, fire up Inventor, call up pages on the internet, trace vectors and convert formats. And in the pounding bass from the bar, in the dim lighting and the reflections of the patio fire, something pops up on your screen. Something great. Something that gives you hope for the future.
Batman brass knuckles. Designed at 12:46 in the morning for Sarms Jabra. The initials are backwards so that when you punch someone, it leaves the imprint of your initials in their skin. We were looking for a killer app for 3D printers. We found this instead.
Yes. Everything will be OK.
First post!
January 12th, 2012Well, we shipped our first orders today. Our first product was a customized iphone case, printed, boxed and shipped at a bleary 5:30 am. But it’s exciting! We’re on our way!
And the photo of the day is…
December 9th, 2011…also from the most picturesque burned-out roadside porn store I’ve ever seen 
self-portrait of the artist in a burned-out roadside porn store in the heartland of america
December 9th, 2011
Occupy 4S
November 25th, 2011
I was walking in Central Hong Kong today[~11/13/11], and on an elevated walkway, I saw a huge crowd camped out behind police barricades. TV cameras were everywhere, gangs of cops were talking into walkie talkies, and Central looked more trashed than I’d ever seen it. Thousands and thousands of people were milling about, the walkway was full of trash and tents and people sleeping on the street. For a moment, I thought I’d walked into an Occupy protest.
Nope! A couple thousand people were camping out for the launch of the iPhone 4S. The iPhone isn’t due to launch for two more days, and people already started camping out the night before, waiting in line to get an iPhone. Walking around, it felt a little like an insanely great version of the United Nations. Pakistanis, Chinese, Hong Kongers, Indians, Filipinas–people were coming in droves, sleeping in the street and waiting for their iPhone. But why? It’s just a phone. Could it possibly be worth spending a couple days crammed in a noisy Hong Kong sidewalk?
As it turns out, it’s absolutely worth it. These weren’t the apple fans who we see waiting in line at the San Francisco or New York stores. Everyone I talked to had one thing in common: they were going to resell their phone. The new iPhones are going for around US$750, and the various people I spoke to were sure that they could resell them for a $120 profit. Apple imposes a limit of two iPhones per person, but that’s a tidy 17% profit in two days. Everybody waiting in this line knows that the world wants iPhones, and they’re not about to let this opportunity slip away.
Ladybugbot en masse
November 10th, 2011
So I made my first Ladybugbot and it worked pretty well. The next step was to make ten of them, and I wanted the new ones to be easy to make and reliable. After playing with the ladybugbot for a bit, I came up with a list of features and design specs.
++ Assembly needs to be snap-together. This will speed everything up and improve the reliability of my vibrating motor mounts (hot glue gets all over the place and has a lot of variability in how well it holds the motor and transfers vibrations). I also noticed that one of my motors got hot and melted the hot glue, which promptly gunked up the motor shaft. No more hot glue.
++ I need to make my own circuitry. I’m using circuitry ripped from a junk DeskPet right now, but it costs ~$15 for a legitimate, off the shelf Deskpet, and that will not abide, man. I’d also like to make it do more than be a R/C toy.
++ I’d like to have high product throughput. It takes about an hour to print out the casing and ~15 minutes to rip out a Deskpet’s guts, cut up some toothbrush heads, solder in my electronics and hot glue everything in place. I’d like to speed up the assembly time, and if I could get better than a product every hour, that would be ideal.
++ I need good yield. I’m getting a ~88% yield coming out of my makerbot
++ It should be cheap. Fancy angled toothbrushes cost $4 each. That and the electronics are the biggest cost driver in the ‘bot right now. I should be able to print my bristle heads.
Here’s the current Ladbybugbot Cost of Good Sold (COGS). I’m placing ABS cost at $50/KG and makerbot time at $1/hour (it costs ~$1000, will last for ~1000 hours and doesn’t cost much to operate).
1x Deskpet electronics (circuit board and battery): $15
2x Toothbrushes @$4/ea: $8 total
2x Vibrating motors, taken from little toys @$2/ea: $4 total
1x casing (~1:30 hour print time, 30g plastic): $3 total
assembly: 15 minutes (not valued, like a sucker)
assembly materials (hot glue, solder, etc): $0.10
1x box and packing materials: $.20
total: $30.3
Well, this is pretty high, but there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit here. The deskpet electronics are an obvious start, and the toothbrushes. If I can print the toothbrushes for $1, I can drop $7 from the COGS, and if I can make my own boards for ~$5, that’s another $10. I found vibrating motors on Alibaba for $.50 each, dropping $3 off the price. I bet I can get 30 minutes off the print time, saving another $.5, and that’s pretty good for a first pass, bringing the COGS down to a (theoretical) $9.80.
If I factor in my ~87% printer yields, every failed print costs me ~$3, so I have to distribute that cost across the ‘bots I can sell, adding $.38 to the cost of every bot.
I’d like to be making ~$5 off each bot I sell, meaning that this ‘bot, sold through a distributor, is probably coming in around ~$20 after the first pass of cost-savings. I’d like to drop that by $5-$10.
So, here’s the BOM I’m shooting for after the next redesign/sourcing effort
1x electronics kit: $5
2x printed bristles @$.5/ea : $1 total
2x Vibrating motors, sourced from alibaba @$.50/ea: $1 total
1x casing (~1:00 hour print time, 25g plastic): $2.25 total
assembly: 5 minutes (not valued, like a sucker)
1x box and packing materials: $.20
total: $9.45
Low-cost 3D printers are a powerful tool, and mine played a central role in the development of this ‘bot. After my third iteration, I switched from using the rapid-prototyping tools that I had ready access to and built with a mix of rapid-prototyping services in the area, parts from catalogs and my own rapid-prototyping tools. Suddenly, my iteration time and cost skyrocketed. On an absolute scale, it wasn’t a lot–any product engineer will tell you that iterating a hardware design in a day for $50 is amazing. Still, though, I was suddenly going through iteration upon iteration without much to show for it. I’d reuse the electronics from my first prototype in ten different prototypes, pulling the electronics out of one and swapping it into another.
The reason I was able to get initial results so quickly is that I was able to use commodity electronics–someone else’s cost-optimized design that already did most of what I wanted. In this case, I used a $.75 circuit board from a low-cost toy. The board had a rechargeable battery, IR receiver, could receive commands from a remote controller, had a small microcontroller to control everything, and could turn two motors off and on. I’m sure it took hundreds of man-hours to perfect the design and production of the remote control electronics that I used. Of course, I could create a custom board to fit my design, and sure–there are some things I’d like my ‘bots to do, but that I can’t do with these off-the-shelf boards (sense the surroundings, communicate with other bots). Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way, though–I’m setting an arbitrary design and doing a lot of custom engineering to create something that fits that design. Why not take a more opportunistic approach and base my design around low-cost, commodity electronics than I can get my hands on? Bristlebots are a great example–all I need to make a new robot design is a mechanical shape to hold everything in place and form bristles to propel the ‘bot. Add my own vibrating motors and the electronics from a $1.60 commodity R/C car and I’ve got a radio-controlled bristlebot.
I don’t think it’s very interesting to just 3D print more plastic shells for commodity products, but it’s interesting to use mass-produced goods as lego-like building blocks to make other more interesting products. It’s not always a perfect fit, but I believe that there’s a lot of clever new designs we can make by building off of other low-cost products. I’m scratching around the tip of something that I believe is very powerful, very interesting, and very big, but exactly what that something is will be a topic for another blog post.
Until then, here’s a sexy naked picture of some ladybugbots:
the $50 swarm
October 28th, 2011
So, I built my first ladybugbot last night. It costs me about $5 US to build one–~$.50 each for the motors, $1 each for the toothbrushes, $1 for the plastic/makerbot time, and the electronics are ‘free’, since I’m cannibalizing them, but I happen to know their factory cost is $.75. It takes me about 15 minutes to solder and hot glue each one.
For a cute little robot that can scoot around my floor, this is pretty good. Right now, though, it’s nothing more than a cute, R/C toy. I’d like to do something more.
First of all, it bugged me that I had to do 15 minutes of assembly per bot, and that I had to print out a top and a bottom, a la last night’s design, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:12975. So, I made a single piece design that would print in 45 minutes, and should only take 5 minutes to assemble. Here’s my v3 design on thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:13004
So I started thinking about what a bunch of cute, cheap bots could do, and what I could put together in a day of soldering. I knew that I could get CDS cells in Sham Shui Po, here in hong kong, so I thought I could make some ‘bots with like seeking/fearing behavior. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a little swarm of bots that freak out and hide under the furniture when you turn on the light? Or a solar powered bot that seeks out light? This isn’t anything that BEAM roboticists haven’t done a million times before, but hey–everyone should have their own swarm, right? In the future (I’m designing the board now), I can put a small AVR on board so I can start programming more interesting behavior.
So today, I fired up the makerbot and started cranking out the next iteration of bots. For the first time, I tried the gcode copy-and-paste trick to make a bunch of objects in series using the automated build platform. It was pretty good–I got 5/6 shells and one ugly plastic blob. By the end of the afternoon, I had eight shells–my goal was 10 $5 ‘bots in the swarm, and I was feeling pretty good.
I started thinking a bit more about a simple little light chasing circuit, so I made this one with a dual comparator, some CDS cells, and two NFETS to drive the motors. There’s nothing novel here–this is right out of what the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain, but it’s fast and cheap, and that’s all I care about. Video of the build coming tomorrow.
