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:

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.

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.

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.

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

The Front Without the Cover

The Back Side of the Camera With Buttons and Lights

The Front of the Camera

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.

]]> http://www.mindtribe.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=387 5 http://www.mindtribe.com/blog/?p=607 http://www.mindtribe.com/blog/?p=607#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 22:52:43 +0000 Tim http://www.mindtribe.com/blog/?p=607 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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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).

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.

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.

To make your typical pot of drip coffee requires nothing more than some hot water, ground beans, and a filter. Mix them together and you have coffee! That’s it—so easy a caveman could do it! I love a good cup of drip coffee, but I find it technically boring (though Bluebottle might disagree).

Espresso is not so simple. After all, espresso is only possible with “recent” advances in technology, and it is pretty new relative to coffee. To make it properly, you need water at just the right temperature. You need the water at a specific pressure. You need a precisely ground 14 grams of espresso beans. You need 30 lbs of even pressure applied to the grounds. And you need to extract 2 ounces after 25 seconds or you did it all wrong. Blah, blah, blah, blah. All this sounds like a lot of work to most people. To us it sounds like fun.

If there was an IEEE standard for espresso extraction, it would include the rules below. These are inputs to a process, ingredients to a recipe. A proper espresso machine should be capable of reaching these levels closely and should do so consistently.

Inputs:

• Water at 200°F, or 93°C – This refers to the water that is being pushed through the coffee grounds
• About 9 bar of water pressure – This refers to the pressure of the water right at the top of the espresso ground “puck” just before it touches any coffee
• Correct coffee grind – The fineness of the grind must be adjusted until it is just right.  This combined with tamping pressure and coffee ground quantity will determine how fast the espresso comes out.
• 14 grams of coffee grounds – This is the agreed-upon standard for two shots of espresso (Most machines do two shots at once. Use 7 grams for one shot machines.)
• 30 lbs of tamping pressure – After adding 14 grams of ground coffee, a tamper should be used to apply 30 lbs of even pressure to the top of the grounds

Now, even if a machine is capable of meeting such specifications, it is up to the person making the espresso to make sure it actually does so. On home machines, it is rare to have any instruments with which to monitor water temperature or pressure. Most of the time, the only metrics you get are from the end result: the espresso itself. This makes it somewhat of a guessing game until your brain starts learning correlations between what you put in and what you get out. The following is what most people will use to gauge how well they did:

Outputs:

• 1 ounce of espresso per shot for a 25-30 second extraction time
• Pours out like warm honey
• A top layer that is dark brown, not blonde, with a slight tint of red
• And, it should taste, um, good

This shot that turned out pretty well. Notice the color and thickness of the crema.

If you would like to begin experimenting with espresso yourself but do not have a machine, here are some recommendations in different price ranges. However, be sure to save some money for a grinder (that is a topic for another post).

Under $200:
DeLonghi EC155 – $95 at Amazon

DeLonghi EC155

People say that for the price, there is nothing better out there.

$200 – $1000:
Rancilio Silvia – $594 at Whole Latte Love

Rancilio Silvia

Silvia is picky about some things (the grind has to be just right for example) but can make a fantastic shot if she gets what she wants. It can make a great hobbyist machine too since there are many people out there upgrading and modifying these machines.

$1000 – $3000:
Expobar Brewtus III-R with Rotary Pump – $1899 at Whole Latte Love

Expobar Brewtus III-R

Wowee, what an awesome machine. PID control loops, rotary pumps, and E61 brew groups, oh my! If you have money to burn, send one of these to yourself. If you have more money to burn, send one to us.

We use a Rancilio Silvia. This model line has been around for a while and has stood the test of time. It’s not perfect, but we love it just the same.

Our Rancilio Silvia among some other coffee buddies

Pros:
Nice big brass boiler. Brass has a lot of thermal mass, which helps to keep the temperature steady.
58mm commercial-grade portafilter.
Three-way solenoid valve.
Generally competent. It is capable of meeting the required inputs for brewing espresso correctly. Many of the cheaper machines simply can’t meet the espresso specs no matter what you do.
Built like a tank.

Cons:
Only one boiler, so after you pull a shot you have to wait for it to rise up to steaming temperature.
Temperature can fluctuate despite the big boiler.  This is because it is regulated by a thermostat.
It’s picky about the grind. If it’s not just right, you likely won’t get a good shot.
Small water reservoir and drip tray.

Finally, to really feel like you fit into the cool coffee club, try to use these terms more throughout your day:

• Espresso – A drink made from the high-pressure oil extraction of coffee beans.  Increased pressures are used in order to make a higher concentration and to extract different flavors than what is possible using conventional drip coffee machines. Espresso can be served itself or be used to make other drinks such as lattes or cappuccinos.
• Crema – A syrupy but foamy layer of emulsified coffee oils that tops a shot of espresso.
• Barista – This is the person making espresso either at a coffee shop or you with your own machine. Means bartender in Italian.
• Portafilter – The handle thing on espresso machines.
• Basket – The perforated cup that snaps into the portafilter. This is what filters the coffee and keeps the grounds out of your drink.
• Pull a shot – To make a shot of espresso. The word “pull” comes from the days when the machines had levers to build the pressure rather than electric pumps.
• Tamper – A tool used to compact the grounds. The compact grounds provide the resistance needed to build the pressure to extract the oils from the coffee grounds.
• Expresso - A word a barista uses before they make you a bad cup of coffee.

Espresso is something that can be causally enjoyed, something that can become a real hobby, and for some a true obsession.  For us at MindTribe, I’d say we’re somewhere in the middle.

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.

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

Much of the engineering challenge of the Elise was to make the car weigh as little as possible. The lighter a car, the more adept it is when the road isn’t straight, and the better it responds to both the gas and brake pedals.

The backbone of the car, or chassis, is the starting point for the rest of a car. Lightness is important here as a lighter chassis means a smaller (lighter) engine can be used, which means smaller brakes and tires can be used, and so forth.

To achieve chassis lightness, Lotus engineers came up with a novel idea for a production car: glue it together. Yep, just glue. No, not the body panels or trim—the load-bearing structure for the entire car. Why glue? The more traditional process—welding—heats metal up and weakens it, thus requiring thicker metal to compensate. Gluing enables use of the thinnest—and therefore lightest—metal structures possible.

A glimpse behind the front wheel reveals orange-colored glue holding the chassis together

Another exciting aspect of the car is the extensive use of aluminum extrusions: they’re fast and cheap compared to equivalent tooling to form, stamp, and assemble traditional sheets of steel. Think of squeezing a toothpaste tube where the toothpaste is aluminum and the opening of the tube is the shape of the desired part. Engineers can quickly and inexpensively create building blocks for a car, and easily change the basic dimensions to create other vehicles.

Aluminum extrusions can be seen throughout the cockpit—note the chassis side rails and structural cross-member integrated with the dash

The same extrusion process can be used for chassis rails and door hinges

To further minimize weight, the body of the car is made of thin fiberglass. It also enables creation of tighter “bends” in the surface and more complex shapes than sheet metal, which both designers and engineers are a fan of.

Fiberglass body panels are lightweight and enable complex shapes

Aside from minimizing mass, there are some noteworthy aerodynamic mechanisms built into the car to maximize performance.

To aid stability at speed and reduce drag, one wants air to flow as smoothly as possible beneath the car (think of the bottom of a boat moving through water). The bottom of the Elise is nearly completely flat to aid in achieving this goal.

The Elise’s flat bottom

At the rear of the car, a diffuser panel manages airflow for a clean transition out from beneath the bottom of the car to minimize flow separation—a low-pressure eddy current of air following the car around, doing its best to slow it down whenever the car is in motion.

The rear diffuser manages airflow as it exits the bottom of the car

If you were sitting in a desk chair, and you wanted a friend to start spinning you around as fast as possible, would you hold your arms outstretched or tightly next to your body? If you held them next to your body, you would reduce your polar moment of inertia, or resistance to turning. Now what about if you were holding an engine in said chair on a twisty road? You’d want it on your lap, as close as possible to the chair’s axis of rotation. The Elise is a mid-engined design, enabling some of the heaviest parts of the car—engine, transmission, and passengers—to huddle together near the middle of the car (the “tub” design of the chassis also allows passengers to sit extremely low to the ground, which also makes for better handling dynamics).

Engine and passengers sit together near the middle of the car to decrease polar moment of inertia, or resistance to turning

As for the geek-out details on the Elise, it is one of the few modern cars available without power steering, enabling a sense of feeling the road with one’s fingertips. Everything in the car that looks like metal is metal, and all the vents on the car are functional. Air for the radiator flows in through the big center opening, and out beneath the windshield. There is an oil cooler behind each of the smaller front openings, and air for the engine intake and cooling flows through the side gills.

All vents have a (functional) purpose

How does everything come together on the road?

No two cars are optimized for exactly the same circumstances, so comparing them is a bit apples and oranges. But for sake of discussion, let’s park the Elise next to a couple of other small, iconic sports cars—the Mazda MX-5 Miata and Porsche 911—to see how they compare.

The 911, Miata, and Elise are similar in size (911 wheelbase 92.5″, Miata 89.2″, Elise 90.5″, whereas a BMW 3-Series Coupe is 107.3″*). Yet the Miata weighs in nearly 500 pounds more than the 1,975 pound Elise (and doesn’t include an integrated rollbar, like the Elise), while the 911 is a full 1,100 pounds heavier than the Elise (though it does include two tiny back seats and is much more comfortable and practical than the Elise).

Why does the weight matter? Take a look at acceleration times for the Porsche and Elise, which are nearly identical around 4.8 seconds for a 0-60 mph run. The Elise manages a (revised) EPA rating of 20/25/22 mpg (city/highway/combined), while the Porsche is 16/24/19. The Miata, with the same engine size as the Elise of 1.8L, is closer in fuel consumption to the Elise as you would expect at 20/26/23, but is significantly slower to 60 mph at 7.7 seconds.

Cost-wise, the price (for the base 2005 model year) of the Miata ($22,098) is roughly half of the Elise ($39,985), while the Porsche ($69,300) is about one-and-three-quarters that of the Elise. Strictly performance-wise, the Elise is a deal compared to the 911, turning in similar performance numbers. That’s not to say the Elise is the best choice given the Porsche would be significantly more practical and comfortable as a daily driver, and the Miata provides incredible bang-for-the-buck. But on purely performance-per-dollar merit, the Elise is hard to beat, which was the intended destination when the Lotus team set out through the jungle.

* All vehicle data based on 2005 model year. Vehicle data sourced from Edmunds.com, autos.aol.com, and respective vehicle manufacturers.

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.

In addition to creating a reference platform for our clients, it was also a good opportunity for us to refresh our knowledge on the state of the whole landscape of the multi-touch industry, from the vendors involved to the range of technologies available. To that end, here’s a brief rundown of some of the most common approaches to incorporate multi-touch into a product:

Resistive

Resistive touch screens have long been the low cost option for single-touch interfaces, commonly found in smart phones, GPS navigators and Chumbys. With some custom sensor hardware and a lot of software IP, a few multi-touch enabled resistive touch screens (such as those from Stantum) have become available.

These modules are targeting the handheld device market with sizes between two and five inches. This puts them in direct competition with the capacitive multi-touch sensors in the next section.

Projected Capacitive

There are two different flavors of capacitive touch:  Surface Capacitive and Projected Capacitive. The details of how these two technologies function could fill an entire blog post, so they will not be covered here. There are, however, key differences that can have a big impact on the design of a product. Finding a good breakdown of these differences proved difficult in our searches, so they will be listed here for those who want to know:

1)      The electrodes of a Surface Capacitive sensor must be directly touched by a finger in order to work. As such, they must be on the top-most layer or surface of the touch panel and cannot be covered. The electrodes of a Projected Capacitive sensor, on the other hand, actually sense the proximity of a finger and are able to sense through thin materials such as the hardened Oleo-phobic glass of the iPhone. In essence, the ability to sense is projected onto the top layer of the panel.

2)      Surface Capacitive sensors are simpler than the projected capacitive type and are much cheaper and more common as a result.

3)      The difference that is most relevant to this blog is that Surface Capacitive sensors cannot be used for multi-touch, at least not in current and common implementations. This should not imply that every projected capacitive sensor is capable of multi-touch, however, only that you should start your search for a sensor at a company which already offers the Projected Capacitive variety.

What makes a Projected Capacitive sensor a multi-touch sensor lies in the layout of its sense electrodes. This pattern is determined by the IC that drives the sensor and currently there are three major players in this space: Cypress Semiconductor, ATMEL and Synaptics. These vendors all have their own electrode patterns associated with their products, so it is important to specify your controller IC to the sensor supplier. Fortunately, sensor variety has been growing along with demand and these compatibility issues should become less of a hurdle.

Projected Capacitive is currently the leader in the handheld multi-touch market with sizes that range from two to ten inches. New products, such as PCs that support multi-touch, have been pushing out the bounds of how large of a screen projected capacitive can support.

Camera-Based

This technology is at the heart of some of the first multi-touch devices and has gained a lot of attention as the core of Microsoft’s Surface product. This approach uses a camera located behind the screen to see where the user’s fingers are touching. There are a number of techniques that use infra-red light and different surface materials to try to get the best touch resolution. With all necessary equipment available to the average consumer, camera-based multi-touch has taken root in the hobbyist community. Open source software packages, such as those from NUIGroup, provide DIY-ers with all of the information they need for a homemade multi-touch setup.

Since the camera needs to be set back from the touch surface a ways, these multi-touch setups must have some depth and are well suited for large applications. Camera-based multi-touch systems have a very wide range of sizes and are well suited to multi-user applications where big touch surfaces are a must.

MindTribe’s Reference Platform

There were a number of pressures that lead us to choose the handheld form factor for our multi-touch demo. Primarily, a small device is most directly relevant to the needs of our clients, whose products are generally smaller than a breadbox. As I outlined above, the technology needed to make a six foot touch screen has nothing in common with what goes into a smart phone. Second, camera approaches aside, the best supported screen size in multi-touch is 3.5 inches. In fact, projected capacitive glass manufacturers such as TPK, Touch International and Wintek have pre-engineered touch sensors available at 3.5 inches. This way, the development costs have been covered and there is no barrier to customers who want this commonly requested size.

MindTribe Mobile Multi-Touch Reference Platform

Another boon to the development of this demonstration platform was a smart phone development platform that we came across. It allowed us to tackle the multi-touch interface without having to first spend the time needed to build up the rest of the system. This device runs Windows CE, comes with a LCD, battery and a slew of interfaces that make it easy to add functionality. We removed the GSM cell module and replaced it with a custom board that held the multi-touch controller, which reports any touch information to the phone’s processor over an I²C interface. The simplicity of this board is a testament to the complexity of the controller IC, in this case a Cypress part (we’re working on additional platforms to showcase the technology of other manufacturers). These controller chips are designed to do all of the heavy lifting when it comes to driving the sensor while still fitting into a tight space.

Speaking of fitting things into tight spaces, we packaged the stack of touch glass, LCD, processor board and battery into a custom enclosure. One of our mechanical engineers was looking for an excuse to try a new rapid prototyping technique called DDM, a variant of FDM. We figured that we could kill two birds with one stone with this project and check this method out while we were developing the multi-touch demo. Take a look at the resulting enclosure in the picture of the assembled demo. Consequently, you can learn more about many available rapid prototyping methods in Troy’s June blog post.

With some quickly written software loaded to show off the multi-touch functionality we were finished with the demo. Overall we found that implementing a projected capacitive multi-touch interface is a straightforward process. There were fewer electrical noise issues than we had feared and, after a few hiccups and slow downs, the I²C interface is working to send the coordinates of our fingertips through our software and onto the screen. While the performance of this demo is decent, it is not as fast as some PC-based demos that we have seen. It goes to show that a lot of optimization work goes into each device that makes it to market. When a touch screen isn’t tracking in real time, it’s apparent. With multi-touch, there is even more data thrown into the mix and good software ensures that the human-machine interaction remains seamless.

Multi-Touch Performance Demonstration Application

With the increasing availability and simplicity of the components needed to add multi-touch to a new product, we expect to see this interface in more and more products. The technology has grown mature enough that product developers no longer need to view it as a risky feature so long as its limitations are well understood.