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Reading between the words

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

I like putting things together. But I like taking them apart a little more (which explains my workbench). Words are different, though; I really enjoy writing so it was a little odd to have a discussion about pulling apart the MindTribe tag line:

Engineering Moxie

When I heard this initially, I liked the sentiment- a product design firm needs to have some moxie-tastic confidence to still be around after the slump of the last few years. I didn’t give it much thought until I started working here.

I was too narrow in my thinking. I’m not certain how it came up but another MindTribe engineer said the tagline as

Engineering Moxie

As though he was saying that we make moxie possible; we build an environment that lets out clients’ moxie. I opened my eyes to the possibilities.

Deconstructing the phrase, there is a lot packed into only two words.

Moxie

First, depending on how I searched for moxie, I got different definitions (though a single etymology: “1908, popularized by Moxie,  trademark name registered 1924 for a bitter non-alcoholic beverage; the word was used as far back as 1876 as the name of a patent medicine advertised to ‘build up your nerve’” [link].) The definitions fell into three categories:

  • Energy: vigor; verve; pep.
  • Nerve: courage and aggressiveness; determination; gumption; guts; grit.
  • Skill: know-how.

Moxie, to me, is the word that means all of these things. That is why it is a word; it encompasses all of these other concepts.

Engineering

As for engineering, it is a noun, verb and adjective so lots of possibilities (verbing weirds language). The formal definition is interesting [link]:

  1. the activities or function of an engineer.
  2. a : the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to people b : the design and manufacture of complex products.
  3. calculated manipulation or direction (as of behavior).

Engineering Moxie

So combining all of these, what does it total to? Since moxie is moxie, it all depends on how one interprets engineering:

How to say it: What it means: Think of :
Engineering Moxie

where engineering is a noun masquerading as a possessive adjective

 Having confidence (and more) as a product development team Engineering (department) donuts
Engineering Moxie

where engineering is a verb, the gerund of “to engineer”

 Helping our clients build the ineffable moxie in their products Making widgets
Engineering Moxie

where engineering is a verb, also gerund of “to engineer” but more direct (and moxie as an adverb-like descriptor)

 Developing products, done with boldness and creativity Creating purposefully
Engineering Moxie

where engineering is an adjective, pertaining to the function of an engineer

 A special type of guts and verve: the guts to create Moxie, form of engineering

What meanings did I miss? How much more room is there between those words? (Let me know in the comments.) So far, though, I am quite pleased with the versatility of our tagline and how well all of the meanings fit MindTribe.

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Where does it all go?

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

Trash, throwing things “away”, and the end of a product’s life.

The Beatles, in their classic Eleanor Rigby, ask, “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?”

I’d like to ask instead, “All the lonely products, where do they all go?” As product engineers at MindTribe our job is to create—to generate, to make. But the making is only the beginning of the story. What ultimately happens to our creations after they live happy, productive lives? In the end, where do they all go?

As I started to ponder these questions, another inspirational figure came to mind. William McDonough is an architect and designer, and author of Cradle to Cradle—Remaking the Way We Make Things. He is a supreme badass on novel ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle (and he’s not exactly a lightweight when it comes to sustainable architecture, either). I saw Mr. McDonough give a talk a few years ago that began with a photograph of the earth from space—our blue marble suspended in a black sea:

Where's "Away"?

He implored us, “point to away.”

“Huh?”

“Away, as in throwing something away—where is that in this photograph?”

Examining that simple, ubiquitous phrase immediately revealed the unrealistic way we think about waste. How many times had I dropped something into a trash can—thrown it “away”—then never thought about it again? It was like objects somehow vanished from existence when they disappeared into a trashcan’s mouth.

Where indeed was “away?” Where did all of the things that passed across that seemingly-magical plane between the outside and inside of a trashcan actually end up? I had some vague picture of landfills and (hopefully) recycling plants, but the picture was fuzzy at best, and beyond that my mind was blank.

So, one December day last year, some fellow MindTribers and I set out to find this mythical “away.” Our journey began by talking trash—literally. We took a trip to the San Francisco transfer station, a massive transitory dump through which all of the city’s trash moves.

Steve and Adam tour the SF transfer station

Here is a summary of what we learned on our day at the dump. Like ants, the city’s garbage trucks perpetually come and go from the transfer station; all day, every day; moving about two thousand tons of trash a day. The photograph below shows the massive trough into which trash is dumped from the city’s garbage trucks.

The massive trash trough at the SF transfer station

After arriving in the trough, trash is bulldozed into larger trucks. These larger trucks ferry it to its final resting place—the Altamont landfill, 50 miles to the east.

Some of other facts and figures from our day at the dump:

Diversion

  • Diversion is a measure of how much stuff doesn’t end up in a landfill: more diversion means less trash in the landfill. Diversion includes recycling and composting, but also can include not making waste in the first place, i.e., eliminating packaging from an existing product.

The Maybe-they’ll-recycle-it-later Myth

  • No post-collection sorting is done in San Francisco. What goes into the black bin ends up in a landfill, whether it could have been recycled or composted or not.

Construction’s Contribution

  • Construction and demolition debris comprise 30% of most waste streams.

Heavyweight Problem

  • SF sends 100 truckloads a day to landfill = 1,800 – 2,000 tons of trash a day (that’s 3.6 to 4 million pounds!)

Theory of Waste Relativity

  • Generally, it’s best to recycle if possible, then to compost, and as a last resort landfill. For example, with paper (which can be recycled or composted) more is regained from recycling it than from composting it.

Things Are Not Always What They Seem

  • PLA (polylactide: a compostable, corn-based material used to make bottles and cups) is dreaded by the SF recycling program. They loathe the stuff because it looks just like plastic, and people put it into the plastic recycling stream instead of compost. One PLA bottle can contaminate a whole batch of otherwise good plastic recycling.

The Depressing Truth

  • Only about 1/3 of what’s in the black bin (landfill bin) is actually trash. That means over 60% of the stuff that ends up in a landfill could have been recycled or composted. That’s pretty sad. The photograph below is a close-up of the landfill pile. Look at all the misplaced recyclables (marked with an orange star)—these will end up in the landfill instead of being recycled.

Close-up of landfill pile, marked items should have been recycled

What Can We Do?

So, what can we do to help things escape the landfill fate? Here are some ways each of us can help reduce the rate at which that landfill is growing:

Make it Easy

  • Put recycling and compost (if you’ve got compost) bins wherever there’s a trash can and vice versa.

Waste station example: green is compost, blue is recycle, black is landfill

Know What Goes Where

  • Print list of what is legal to recycle (and compost if you’ve got it) in your area. Post the list in a visible locations by all waste stations. San Francisco Recycling once found a car engine in a blue recycle bin—not recyclable!

Engineer a Difference

And here are some things we can do as product designers to improve a product’s fate at its inception:

  • Avoid co-molding (fusing two different materials together). In general, make different materials easily separable.
  • Avoid painting (makes recycling impossible).
  • Make things easy to disassemble.
  • Make batteries easy to remove.
  • Use an LCA (Life Cycle Assessment)  tool, like Sustainable Minds, to quantify impact at the get-go.

So Mr. McCartney, back to the original question, “All the lonely products, where do they all go? For us in San Francisco, they mostly go to the massive and growing Altamont landfill. Each day that trash pile grows by 4 million pounds. For those products that we can and do (and should) recycle or compost, it’s a significantly better fate.

Beginning to understand the end of a product’s life—at least acknowledging that life doesn’t end once it’s deposited in a trash can—has inspired me to make better decisions during a product’s creation. I’m Adam at MindTribe; thanks for reading.

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Products (and Companies) We Love: Rickshaw Bagworks

Monday, April 19th, 2010

2009 was a tough year. The economy wasn’t (isn’t — ed.) so hot. Companies that weren’t dying were hurting. I was laid off in April and bounced around some before landing my dream job at MindTribe. So when they told me that (in addition to giving me a job) I was going to receive a custom-made messenger bag, it felt like Christmas!

Steve, MindTribe CEO and San Franciscan urbanite, was passionate about this SF outfit called Rickshaw Bagworks, so the whole company made the CalTrain ride to visit Rickshaw where we ate pizza, drank beer, and designed our bags.

And that’s the first awesome thing about Rickshaw.

Local: Connecting Asian manufacturing with San Francisco custom craftsmanship

Like most industries, “soft goods” have been transformed by manufacturing in Asia. As the Rickshaw site explains, the inner “chassis” of the bag is cut and sewn in Asia, but final assembly and customization takes place in their San Francisco headquarters. This allows them to deliver inexpensive, high quality soft goods from Asia that are still “built-to-order” locally. They have many different options to choose from on the website but if you design it at the store you can use their full range of fabrics and designs.

I went with their backpack:

(Image from www.rickshawbags.com)

and fretted for an hour over which shade of gray cordura to use. Alan (MindTribe engineer) likes his “Skinny” Messenger:

But Elecia (MindTribe engineer) thought a print suited her best with the “Zero” Messenger:

That brings us to the next awesome thing about Rickshaw.

Green: Ecologically sound products for the 21st century

But first, a digression!

As a kid, I remember my mom making dresses for my sisters, quilts for her friends, and blankets for babies. I remember all the oddly shaped cutouts and scraps that were the detritus of my mother’s creative process. My mom made some beautiful things, but I remember all those scraps that ended up in the trash.

Rickshaw’s answer is the “Zero”, a messenger bag that generates zero waste during its manufacturing and assembly. There are no scraps cut off and thrown away – everything ends up as an integral piece of the bag. This is akin to folding an origami unicorn, and then discovering, folded up inside…

Baby unicorns.

Perhaps I’ve overstated it? Well, it’s still pretty cool.

Their green approach extends to material selection as well. Their use of 100% post-consumer PET (i.e. plastic bottles) in their “Bottles To Bags” program to create beautiful, durable prints is interesting. Mark Dwight, Rickshaw CEO, describes the “Bottles To Bags” program here. In fact, both Alan’s “Skinny” and Elecia’s “Zero” Messenger bags are made from this type of fabric. I didn’t even realize there was anything special about them until I started taking photos and asking questions for this blog entry. To me, they just looked good.

That’s pretty awesome, when you think about it, and here’s why: I’m not that interested in green design. Don’t misunderstand me – I can see as well as anyone that we are failing in our task to be stewards of the planet. I’m willing to pay a premium for green design but every product, green or no, must sell on its merits and not just on its politics.

In short: The bags have to be good.

Design: Green is good, but good is better

These bags are good. Really good. Surprisingly good. Someone at Rickshaw spent an awful lot of time thinking about what I needed in a backpack.

I take my laptop everywhere and I try to bike everywhere (at least when it’s not raining. Thanks, El Nino). I need a well padded laptop pouch:

But perhaps that’s not for everyone so the pouch is removable.

(Ooh, double product placement! Check out gelaskins!)

In fact, customization and versatility may start in manufacturing but they are built in to the product. The front pocket also has its removable pouch:

Which is really handy when I’m traveling and carrying my passports and boarding cards and cash and pens and keys and notebook. This little pouch even has an internal keyring!

The backpack has a waterproof bottom that lets it stand upright while I pack it for the ride home:


This is a big bag but still manages to fit nicely under the seats on plane rides. In fact, the bag is quickly converted to a briefcase/tote bag for businesspeople on the go. Just unclip the backpack straps and using the meaty handle on top:

And they even have lots of nice little touches that I keep finding. For example, they include “silencers” for the outer straps if you want the quiet professionalism of magnets instead of the noisy security of velcro:

Look closely. Onside is labeled “Shhh” and one side is labeled “RRRIP”. Like I said, nice little touches.

Products We Love: Rickshaw Bags

If you are looking for a well-designed, well-made bag from a company with progressive business practices, head on over to Rickshaw’s site, or if you are up in San Francisco, drop in.

Tell them MindTribe sent you.

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Products We Love: Mini Gumstick Camera

Friday, April 9th, 2010

I recently purchased a miniature camcorder to play around with. It is an interesting little piece of equipment. First of all it’s tiny. It’s about the size of those 5-packs of gum like Juicy Fruit or Doublemint comes in. The video it takes is not too bad either. It shoots at 720×480 at 30 frames per second, and the color and general picture quality are pretty good. It uses a Micro SD card for storage and can plug directly into a USB port for downloading. The really surprising part though is that it was only $14 shipped.  Really, that’s not a not a typo.  It’s $14, and that includes shipping! At this price it’s practically disposable.

It's Light and Small In the Hand

Camera and Friends

I purchased mine for use in an RC plane since it’s so small and lightweight.  Also, it’s so cheap that if it gets smashed or lost, it’s not the end of the world.  It was simple to just tape onto the bottom of the plane or to cut a hole and have it stick out.

A Frame Capture From Some Video Taken Over Carmel Beach

Like any self-respecting engineer, I wanted to know what was inside.  Below are some pictures from a quick teardown.  The chip count is pretty low, and most components are easy to identify.

The Back Side With the Aluminum Cover Removed

Sir, your robe is open...

The Front Without the Cover

The Back Side of the Camera With Buttons and Lights

The Front of the Camera

Ahh!! My eye!!

The image sensor is socketed and just pops off. This thing is tiny.

There are a couple things about this camera that aren’t perfect though.  The date can’t be set properly, so the camera always thinks it’s filming a New Year’s party in 2008.  Also, the video is saved as Motion JPEG which takes up a lot of space.  This compression is much simpler than something like H.264, so it’s easier for the processor to do in real time.  Another thing is the sound can cut out occasionally as you can hear in the following video, but this is pretty minor.

Also, I was cheating a little bit on the price.  You do need a Micro SD Card too, which would run you an extra few dollars depending on the size you get.  I’m using a 2GB card.  It records at around 1 megabyte per second, so that means I get about half an hour of record time with 2GB.

It seems there are different versions of this camera in the same or very similar packaging.  I can’t speak for the quality of others, but I am very happy with the one I have.

The unit I bought was sourced off Ebay. You can find it there by searching for something like “gum camera” or “mini dvr”. You can also find this camera at various online spy equipment or random junk stores, however they usually sell them for at least $100.

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Captain, can I use my iPad now?

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Ah, today we all basked in the glow of the iPad, Apple’s most recent entry into the world of consumer gadgetry. Though there was much to delight in about it, we noticed that the Airplane Mode setting was conspicuously missing from its feature set. As a result, lucky iPad owners will need to either individually turn off the Bluetooth and WiFi radios, or simply turn the whole iPad off when in-flight.

Well, of course this touched off the whole debate about the use of electronic devices in the plane. Do they really interfere with the navigation instruments? Or, is it a conspiracy to force you to use the ridiculously expensive ($1-2/min) air phone service. It was amazing how passionate people were on their positions.

Let’s take a moment to survey the situation a bit. It’s tricky because both the FAA and FCC have things to say about this one.

Here’s the official word from the FCC as of 2007, with comments on the FAA’s position: http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/cellonplanes.html

And on March 15th, 2006, in episode 49 the local Mythbusters team tackled this one as well: http://mythbustersresults.com/episode49

There are two issues in play. The first is the idea of interference with the navigational equipment on the aircraft. In practice, with clear weather, this is probably a non-issue as even if interference occurs, since a pilot would likely recognize it and recover. However, in IMC (instrument meteorological conditions), the lives of all aboard the aircraft hinge on the successful reception and interpretation of received radio signals, some of which (GPS for example) are incredibly weak and require very sensitive receivers. This is the reason that all electronic devices must be turned off during take-off and landing phases of flight because when we’re close to the ground those signal interruptions could have catastrophic results.

The second issue is one of interfering with ground equipment. This is primarily a cell phone issue since a large number of cell towers (many more than usual) can see your signal when you’re in the air, and you consume far more voice channels that would be normal, thus clogging the system. Good for you, not so good for others.

So, in short, best to follow the captain and make absolutely certain your electronic devices (with wireless radios or not) are turned off during take-off and landing phases of flight (especially in IMC) as these are the most critical moments from a safety standpoint. In good weather, using your cellphone is likely more annoying to other phone users on the ground than it is harmful to you in the air.

In recognition of this, the FCC and other agencies are actively looking for ways to allow users to use cell phones in the air, and enjoy those wonderful gadgets as fully as we enjoy them on the ground. Until then, though, the rules say no, and the captain of the aircraft still has the final say.

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Products We Love: EyeClops Night Vision Goggles

Monday, April 5th, 2010

This toy was an instant sensation in the MindTribe office. These goggles, made by JakksPacific, use a camera sensitive to infrared light coupled with IR LEDs to give the user surprisingly good night vision.

EyeClops Night Vision Goggles

We tore through the packaging and got testing right away. The bathrooms are the only rooms here at the MindTribe office without windows or skylights and can be made pitch-“can’t tell if your eyes are open or closed”-black as a result*. Turning on the night vision goggles in this dark space is like turning on a headlamp—that is, when you’re looking through the small LCD in front of your right eye. The view through this display is clear and bright enough for you to get a good sense of what’s around you, although depth perception is a different story and running is a definite No-No. A quick look in the mirror shows that the LEDs mounted to the front of the device are putting out a good amount of IR light (there’s even a “high beam” mode where a second bank of LEDs are lit).

Now that we’ve established these goggles are pretty good for night vision, what’s really amazing is that they sold for only $80 (sadly, these goggles are no longer produced, though you can still get a binocular version in stores)! This low price is possible because most camera sensors can already detect infrared light. You can check this by pointing your television’s remote control at your digital camera and pressing some buttons. You will see some flashing light on your camera’s display that you can’t see with the naked eye. In fact, manufacturers will often put a filter over the sensor to try to prevent IR from showing up in photographs. So, if you take the IR filter off of an otherwise normal camera sensor and then add some IR LEDs… BOOM, you have a sweet night vision setup. For more information on what’s inside this toy and how they were able to keep costs so low, check out this teardown by EE Times’ Bob Widenhofer.

In addition to cautiously walking around while wearing these goggles and using TV remote controls as flashlights, we made an interesting discovery. The ambient light and proximity sensors of the iPhone are normally pretty hard to see. They are hidden behind very dark windows in the otherwise black section above the display. If the sunlight hits these windows at the right angle, you can see where these sensors are, but the Apple designers did a good job of hiding them. If you look at an iPhone through the goggles, though, the windows for the two sensors really stand out. Our guess is that these windows were designed to let the infrared light needed by the sensors through but reflect most of the visible light away to keep them as invisible to the user as possible.

View of iPhone in Visible Light

An iPhone as seen in visible light. (Normal camera used for photo)

iPhone viewed through IR camera.

iPhone as seen through the eyepiece of the goggles.

Though these goggles were bought for entertainment purposes, we were pleasantly surprised at little discoveries they enabled like this one.

* It turns out that the bathrooms make perfect darkrooms for when we need to measure the brightness or contrast of a LCD.

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Hacking the Sony XEL-1

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

The Sony XEL-1 television is a technological marvel.  Released in 2007,  this 3mm-thin OLED beauty boasts an incredible 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio in a laughably small 11″ form factor.  Nevertheless, at the time it was released the panel in the XEL-1 was nearly twice as large as the next commercially available OLED panel, and it represented a major leap forward for Sony.

Organic LEDs (OLEDs) provide several advantages over other display technologies such as TFT LCDs.  Each picture element, or pixel, in an OLED is actually a very small LED emitting monochromatic light.  This means that when a pixel in an OLED displays black, zero light is emitted.  In contrast, the pixels in a TFT LCD operate by selectively blocking light that is emitted from a CCFL or LED backlight.  When a TFT LCD displays black, the pixels block the backlight, but only partially.  The light that gets through causes the display to appear lighter and, well, less black.

The dark blacks and brilliant whites of an OLED are described by its contrast ratio.  The contrast ratio of any display is the ratio of the luminance of the brightest color to the luminance of the darkest color.  A typical TFT LCD contrast ratio is about 3,000:1, meaning that the darkest black is 3,000 times dimmer than full white.  As I mentioned earlier, the XEL-1 OLED has a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1!  Talk about the blackest of blacks!  How much more black could it could be?  The answer is none.  None more black.

OLEDs also benefit from their potential as low-power displays.  An OLED consumes power in direct proportion to the number of pixels turned on.  If the OLED is used to display light text on a dark background or some other similarly sparse image, relatively few active pixels are required.  This results in significant power savings compared to a TFT LCD, which must drive the backlight at a uniform brightness across the entire display.  Of course, it’s possible for an OLED to consume a large amount of power if all of the pixels are turned on simultaneously.  This is called “flashlight” mode.  It’s more of a secondary feature.

The future of OLED technology is not difficult to imagine.  So when a client came to MindTribe recently with an idea for an advanced concept product, naturally we focused on an OLED display.  An uncommonly large OLED, in fact.  And despite weeks of searching, we could only find one reliable source for an OLED of the right size…

A Panel Apart

Once past the hesitation of chopping up a $3,000 television for parts, the process of reverse engineering the interface to the XEL-1 OLED panel  proved to be an enjoyable challenge.  The XEL-1 consists of two primary pieces – the panel and base.  Each piece has its own PCB, and the functionality appears to be divided as follows:  the panel is responsible for generating the correct voltages and drive signals for the OLED pixels given power and video data, and the base is responsible for everything else.  There is a full teardown available over at Bunnie Studios, so we’ll only focus on the most significant bits (MSBs) here.

OLED video cable showing differential pairing of conductors.

OLED Video Cable with paired LVDS conductors

The panel connects to the base via two shielded flat flexible cables (FFC).  Some very helpful visual cues on the panel PCB, including the components near each cable connector,  suggested that one of the cables carries power, while the other carries video.  Furthermore, by following the traces from the video connector to a THine THC6LVD104 LVDS receiver, we determined the video is transmitted in a 7:1 LVDS format.  This discovery corresponded nicely with the observation that the conductors on the video flex cable are arranged as differential pairs, with ground connections between each pair.

On the output side of the LVDS receiver, the video data feeds into a large Cyclone II FPGA via a 35-bit parallel bus running at just over 37MHz.  The 35 bits are divided as follows:  10 bits of color information per channel x 3 channels (RGB) = 30 bits color,  3 timing control bits (HSYNC, VSYNC, Data Enable [DE]), and 2 unused bits.  Some simple probing with an oscilloscope revealed the control bit assignments, allowing us to determine the video signal timing.  Interesting fact: although the XEL-1 is listed as having a resolution of 960×540, the panel is actually driven at a resolution of 976×548.  A close look at the panel—sans metal bezel—exposes the extra pixels masked by a printed border.

A simple test image helped betray the color bit assignments.  The image consisted of three vertical stripes, one red, one blue, and one green.  Since the video signal refreshed left to right, top to bottom, each color bit strobed during the portion of each horizontal refresh that corresponded to the color of that bit.  For example, each blue bit would strobe during the final third of the horizontal refresh interval, whereas each green bit strobed during the middle third of the same interval.  Varying the intensity of the colors allowed us to further determine the relative significance of each color bit.

RGB test image for determing color bit locations.

Color bit assignment test image (in case the description was confusing)

Armed with a full mapping of the bits in the video signal, we turned our attention to the non-video signals carried over the video flex cable.  Probing with a DMM seemed to indicate that these signals were unused, but a closer inspection with an oscilloscope showed otherwise.  Two of the signals collude to establish a full-duplex, 115,200 baud asynchronous serial channel, used in a base-initiated command-response pattern.  Two other signals appear to function as standard logic-level control lines driven by the base.

The power cable held no mystery, with significantly fewer conductors arranged into three obvious groups.  Five of the conductors are used for common, two for +5 volts, and three for +16 volts.  Interestingly, the power brick for the XEL-1 produces a regulated +16V output, and the output of the power brick feeds directly through the base to the panel.  Sequencing here was pretty trivial, as the +16 volt rail is on anytime the unit is plugged in, and the +5 volt rail turns on or off with the panel.

Power connector

OLED panel power connector with obvious pin groups.

It’s ALIVE!

We constructed a test system for driving the OLED using an Atom™-based single board computer (SBC) and a small ARM7 development board from Olimex.  The SBC was selected because it provided direct LVDS video out through a Hirose DF13 connector.  An adapter cable jumpered the LVDS output of the SBC to a proto-board with a flex connector.  The microcontroller was also patched into the flex connector to drive the control signals and serial interface.

Mimicking the video timings of the original base electronics involved creating a custom display driver using Intel’s Embedded Graphics Driver (IEGD) kit.  The IEGD kit is basically a tool for building driver packages for fixed-mode displays, the kind found in ATMs or vehicle navigation consoles.  Using the kit, we created a driver for generating a precisely-timed signal on the LVDS port and mirroring that output to the DVI port for debugging.   Finally, all that remained was an install process with multiple, unnervingly long display blackouts  and one final reboot…

Complete test setup running Windows XP with cloned display.

Complete test setup driving OLED and cloned display. You can see on the bench supplies that the panel by itself is consuming just over 12W.

Clearly, this article would not have been written if it hadn’t worked.  That’s not to say that it worked the first time.  Indeed, it did not, and there were plenty of setbacks that have been omitted here for the sake of brevity (and to make us sound more deft).

Full setup details

Closer shot of the test setup. You can see the Olimex board (top) and the SBC (right) patch into the cable adapter (center), which connects to the panel (left).

It’s clear that OLED technology is shaping up to be the future of displays, though it will be some time before the really large panels become economical for consumer devices.  Nevertheless, more and more new products are using OLED technology now for sharper graphics and better power efficiency.  Organic Displays.  Coming soon to a farmers’ market near you.

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On Espresso – Part I

Friday, February 19th, 2010

Ah, coffee. What a great friend it has been. It’s been there countless times to wish me a good morning, to keep me company on a long road trip, or to stay up with me late at night studying. It’s seen me at my best and my worst. All I do for coffee is spray it with scalding water and throw it away when I’ve had enough.  (Between you and me, I don’t know what it’s getting out of this relationship.) But, it’s always been there at my side when I need it most.

Lately some of us here at MindTribe have had a fascination with coffee, specifically with espresso.  We not only enjoy drinking it, but making it is always a fun little experiment too.  Like so much that we do here, making espresso is very much both an art and a science.
(more…)

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Products We Love: Lotus Elise

Friday, December 11th, 2009

If you hang around the MindTribe lounge long enough, in addition to becoming current on the latest Internet memes, you’ll hear passionate sales pitches from one of us to another.

You’d swear a royalty check was involved, or that we’re selling one of the thousands of products in that picture.

In actuality, great products are an inspiration to us. We know they’re the result of a talented team successfully forging it’s way through a jungle of thick vegetation, quicksand, and wild beasts conspiring to steer the team toward the Land of Mediocrity.

I wouldn’t be the first engineer to claim that the team behind the Lotus Elise successfully navigated this jungle, coming out the other side nearly unscathed. If an engineering team ever wore out their Rocky Theme Song cassingle during the traverse, it must have been this one.

To appreciate what’s the big deal with this car, you have to understand its mission: to provide extremely high performance at a relatively low price point. To pull this off, there are a host of elegant engineering solutions and optimizations, as well as some admittedly small details that simply offer up a geek-out moment in the right company.

Elise_cars

The first (right) and second (left) generation Lotus Elise

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Poking Around with Multi-Touch: Building MindTribe’s Multi-Touch Mobile Reference Platform

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

The iPhone was the breakthrough product that introduced multi-touch—the ability to manipulate a touch screen interface with multiple fingers at once—to the average consumer. Along with the popularity of the iPhone came the realization that this new technology could make a user interface more flexible and more intuitive than previously possible. As such, MindTribe has seen a surge in companies looking to incorporate multi-touch interfaces into their products.

While the tools needed to implement a multi-touch interface are increasing in availability, they are still not established enough to be in the hands of every company’s engineers or contract manufacturers, and product technologies and offerings are rapidly evolving from week to week.

Some of our clients see the addition of multi-touch as an avenue to differentiating themselves, some see a means of creating new user experiences, while others seek insight in determining whether multi-touch is feasible for their product.

The rush for multi-touch is on. To help our clients quickly get an intuitive feel for the possibilities and limitations of multi-touch interfaces, we built a mobile reference platform to enable quick and easy experimentation. The product of this effort, a handheld demo unit, will serve as an anchor to future client discussions on the technology.

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