It lets you do multiline stuff, and you get to see the output right away. You don't need let, or to repeat the "main = do ..." every time you want to run a block of code.
I think it's really helpful when you're starting out.
Actually it could be. Let's say there's this beacon software that lets you look a bit into how someone interacts. Say you get to know what 'spending tier' they're in - high, medium, or low. You also get to see how much 'social influence' they have - again, high, medium, low. Why would you give a free hot dog to someone in the low-low tier? You probably wouldn't, but right now you have to carpet bomb free stuff. Select who gets your free stuff so you can maximize your influence. Have it pop up when someone is walking down your street, at a particular time of day.
When the big spender with a lot of friends walks by, drunk, at 2:30 in the morning home from the bar, send him a free sandwich coupon when he hits your street. Throw in a bag of chips and a pop, make it 'special'. Perfect advertisement to target the perfect people.
Your software lets companies deliver freebies to 'important' people when they're nearby. Have some automated identity finders - find them on fb, g+, twitter, see how much reach they have. Give them some free stuff, see if they tweet about it, put them a bit higher in the ranks because they gave a good word (or any word at all).
That's an awesome chord keyboard - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY#t=2039 I've always wondered why more people don't use them. It seems significantly less prone to errors - instead of fat fingers or incorrect placement, you have to coordinate the timing between the fingers.
It's pretty amazing how much that video demonstrates. I wonder what the next version of that video will be. Hopefully it's not computer related.
I'd like to try one, but there appears to be basically no such thing as a bluetooth-enabled one-hand chord keyboard that you are intended to hold in your hand (as opposed to having on a table), and that's the use case I'm interested it... an input device for my augmented reality glasses while I'm walking around. On that note, if they're ever going to make a... well... can't really make a comeback if you never made an appearance at all... an appearance, that's probably the scenario that will drive them. Voice may cover casual usage, but when you really need to go to town you're going to need something more, and no current input device can meet that need.
If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, you could probably make a prototype pretty easily. A battery, some buttons, and a bluefruit[1] should be enough to make one. You would likely need to also write some kind of input translator (Custom android keyboard or so?) to wrap/ convert the value from straight key presses to your combinations (since you want a combination of key presses to give you just one character). 3D print a case, and you're probably all set to go.
I mean, it's likely easier said than done, and would take some time and effort, but it's probably also pretty do-able.
Since Arduino can be programmed to function as a keyboard[1], wouldn't that be an easier option? Then you can put the chording logic on the Arduino board and have it function like a plain USB keyboard otherwise as far as the computer is concerned[2] (that's kind of how the Makey Makey[3] works - it's also Arduino based).
Yeah, you should be able to do that as well. There are a lot of different ways you could make a project like this work, I was just wanting to throw out an example to show that we're empowered to do these kinds of things now. We don't have to wait for some company to come out with a portable, bluetooth chording keyboard anymore, we can do these kinds of things ourselves. I think that is really exciting!
I totally agree, I think their time has come and it'd be great if someone could rescue the tech from all these dead or dying companies and provide a decent chording keyboard for people on the move.
I poked around Google quite a bit a few months ago. If you drop any one of my adjectives, you can come up with something, but the full gamut does not appear to exist.
It wouldn't be very useful without NLS. It wasn't intended for text entry but to select commands to execute while the mouse selected the target for the commands, ie you would enter DW for "delete word" with the chorded keyboard and use the mouse to select the word to delete.
It disappeared because the people a Xerox Labs decided it was too hard for normal people to learn to interact with a computer in this way, so they replaced the chorded keyboard with on-screen buttons plus a set of keys on the left of the keyboard for the most used operations (Undo, Open, Copy, Paste, etc).
Then Apple, to make things even friendlier, removed the extra buttons from the keyboard entirely and relegated the most frequently used operations to key combinations (Cmd-C, Cmd-X, Cmd-V, etc). You will notice that many shortcuts are relegated to the left side of the keyboard.
I wish there was more of this type of information about injection molding, that seems like more of a dark art than electronic assembly.
What do you guys think of having the component manufacturer source the parts? I've seen some that purchase parts directly from Digikey, but I'm not sure if they pool together orders for discounts, or if they just handle the purchasing so you don't have to. It seems like they could get a better deal than I could (I always assumed that a manufacturer would try to source locally in China and get stuff for dirt cheap, but they buy from Digikey too - seems kind of strange).
Does anyone know any good US based contract manufacturers? All the ones I've seen are ridiculously expensive ($17 for a 4" x 1" board with ~60 components, as opposed to ~$6 at Myro (thanks theunixbeard for catching that error)). I'd love to get something made here in the US, but I can't eat another $10 for my lights - especially for a service like assembly (where the quality seems like it won't matter that much - the light will work or it won't work). I've been toying with the idea of a stretch goal on Kickstarter to assemble some delta bots to do the electronic assembly (it'd be about $1200 for a single bot, whereas contract manufacturing is about $2000, but I'd have something to show for that money with a pick and place machine). Having a machine where you could throw a stenciled PCB on in any orientation, then pick and place the parts onto, and cook it on the spot (moving the camera up and watching for reflow) would be pretty awesome.
It's sticky being in the 'middle' - big enough where you need to use services rather than hand assembly, but small enough where you don't really have any purchasing power. The road to production has a big no man's land in the middle.
>>> It's sticky being in the 'middle' - big enough where you need to use services rather than hand assembly, but small enough where you don't really have any purchasing power. The road to production has a big no man's land in the middle.
Second quote of the week in one week. ;-)
I make a couple of small electronic gadgets for my side business. My day job is also involved in electronic manufacturing, and I've had a good overview of what it involves.
Amusing anecdote: I was restocking a critical part, and noticed that one of the _alternate_ part numbers was on end-of-life status. I panicked and bought out my supplier's entire inventory of my preferred part number.
That turned out to be the world's remaining supply, and the part is now obsolete. I suppose at the end of the day, the lesson is that no matter how good you think your suppliers are about keeping you apprised of component lifetime issues, once in a while, you're going to get screwed.
For being in the "middle," it's not just purchasing power, but that there are a lot of shady vendors out there. Any start-up that is headed towards that wilderness had better have an experienced buyer along. In fact, if you're still working at a day job, any experience you can get in the trenches of supply chain management will probably benefit you.
It's also worth considering what your design chain looks like, because it is intertwined with your supply chain. For instance, if you're shopping your firmware work out, and your microchip goes obsolete, you'll need to have a plan for responding quickly. I've observed that sourcing issues can eat a measurable fraction of your engineering department's time and attention.
At this point, I've stuffed and soldered 1000+ boards.
> sourcing issues can eat a measurable fraction of your engineering department's time and attention.
Or worst. I personally experienced a sourcing issue kill eight months of engineering design work and hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was a simple case of being a small fish in a big pond and the suppliers not giving a shit about providing advance EOL notices. No recourse. You have to redesign your product and hope to survive.
>What do you guys think of having the component manufacturer source the parts?
I'm assuming you're asking about having the contract manufacturer source the parts, right? This is typically called "turnkey" contract manufacturing as opposed to "consignment" where you source the parts yourself. It really depends on the kind of product you're building and your ability to negotiate with component distributors an manufacturers. If it's your first time around and you're optimizing for speed, turnkey is probably the way to go. If you need specialty parts and you know how to source them more effectively than your CM, then consignment may make more sense.
When I was involved in sub-contract engineering (more than 10 years ago) our firm had a weird setup. If we sourced the parts we'd charge a 10% fee. The customer avoided that fee if they provided the parts.
It's weird because when we buy off our BOMs from our regular suppliers we'd get well packed components that were easy to goods-in inspect and put to kit. If we needed 250 surface mount resistors we knew we either had a reel, or we would buy a reel because we'd probably use them.
But when the customers supplied stuff it'd come in horrible little bits and bobs. You'd get a strip of exactly 250 SM resistors. (Which is horrible for the P&P machine we were using, and resistors get dropped by the machine a lot). To us it should have been the other way round - "Supply the kit yourself? We charge you 10% (of something) because we still have to goods in inspect it and kit it and etc".
Most manufacturers are happy to do a mix. So, if your product uses one weird IC and you happen to have stock of it, but nothing else, feel free to tell them that you're supplying that part.
Can anyone explain to me how they're worth $3 billion dollars? They haven't produced anything, they haven't advanced humanity, they have the eyeballs of teens - for the moment, until something cooler comes along. Are they really that valuable? It doesn't seem like there's any show stoppers for creating a snapchat clone (rather than having X users at the moment), and if snapchat were to start making money - say by sending ads to endorse a product rather than a user generated picture, people would probably start leaving the platform towards the newest green pasture.
I recently got a new phone, and I got hooked in to all the services my friends were talking about in recent memory - instagram's dead, twitter's dead, snap chat is in flux. Not for all users, but in my group of friends these services aren't used as much. There isn't really anything keeping you from moving onto something new - your digital life isn't really that valuable. It's probably better to not read the conversations you had a year ago. The pictures are always nice, that's probably the only thing that people would care about, but with Snapchat they're gone (unless you hit save). I'm not sure what I'm getting at, but this company isn't worth $3 billion dollars.
Interestingly, instagram has taken on a new life for preteens who can't convince their parents to allow a chat app. The kids are using the posting function as a pseudo-chat feature.
That's kind of interesting. They seem to be tracking the expected delivery date really well. At first, it says 1-2 business days. Then it went to November 5th, then it moved to November 8th. The black 16gb is moving the quickest at the moment.
What's the point of having google.com/nexus/5, when people are going to be purchasing it from the play store (splitting traffic, rather than sending it all to the store)?
"Lower-income and less educated whites also have shifted substantially toward the Republican Party since 2008. The GOP has largely erased the wide lead Democrats had among white voters with family incomes less than $30,000." [0]
Although the graphs on [1] tell a slightly different story.
I'm making bike lights. First a little story. I was late to class one day in March, pothole season. I was cruising in the drops, when I came up to a T intersection. A van pulls up, and stops at the stop sign. As I approach the intersection, I see a pothole, swerve to avoid the hole, and the van pulls forward. I have about 1 second before I hit the van, land with my back on the hood, slide onto the ground. I'm lying there for a moment, trying to figure out what just happened, wondering whether or not anything is broken. I wiggle my fingers, wiggle my toes, don't feel any pain. I stand up, the guy gets out of his car "Sorry man! I thought you were turning!" I say I think I'm fine... I go look at my bike - it's still upright, the front tire got wedged in a rust spot. I grab it out, hop on, and ride. I couldn't help but laugh the rest of the way to class.
That's the day I decided that bikers and automobiles need better communication. So I made a bike light that's easy to use, has front & back blinkers, brake lights, turns on when you ride (so you can't forget), a bright front light, USB rechargeable, 3400 mAh LiIon battery. I made a 3D printer to print the parts, I did the PCB design, physical design, and software. It's pretty damn cool. I ride pretty regularly and recharge it about once every three weeks. It's surprisingly water resistance - I am a little scared of selling this to people as I didn't know how it would handle water, but I've taken it through two large storms, one with huge puddles splashing all over the cases, and the light handled it all in stride.
I'm stalling on it a little bit right now - there's not a very good way of bootstrapping into manufacturing. I could 3D print the cases and assemble the boards, but each case takes about 20 hours to print (on my fiddly printer). There's ~100 components too, which is a pain for manual placing and reflowing. I have a couple other designs brewing that are simpler and lower cost, but without all the fancy features. Speaking of which... I have to go get some interrupts working.
It is hard to tell from the photo, but it looks like the the turn signal indication is the standard "blink on the side" style. When the lights are close together like they are with this design (as is practical for bikes), it's very hard to distinguish which side is blinking from even a short distance.
Could I suggest that instead of blinking on one side or the other, you turn the lights on in sequence heading toward the direction of the turn? For example, for a turn, you could illuminate light #1, then #1 and #2, then #1 and #2 and #3, then off and repeat.
That seems to me a much clearer indication of intention from the point of view of a vehicle some distance away looking through less than clean glass.
Definitely possible, thanks for the suggestion. I'll consider it and do a visibility test.
There's 5 LEDs on the back - three reds and two amber turn signals. When blinking, the center red LED stays solid to provide a reference for the turn signal.
I've thought about Kickstarting a bit. I guess my hesitation is that I'm terrified of pulling the trigger to get something injection molded. I don't trust my 3D modeling abilities enough to know that when I get something injection molded it will work. And injection molding is a lot money, so if I mess it up, I might not have enough money for a redo. That scares me, a lot. I'm not sure, I guess I'm scared of actually making something people would use - I want it to be perfect, and I know it isn't yet.
I actually went to the local university - they said that you can't use university resources for personal gain (I was trying to print a case on their 3D printer). I'm sure there would be some people in the engineering department willing to give me some pointers, there's also a local prototyping company (I've emailed them a few times). Nothing too serious though - I guess I don't really have much of a plan yet, and didn't want to rush into getting roped into sticky situations.
Thanks for asking the questions - I just reached out to a friend who said he'd help me before, maybe this thing will start rolling :).
That sounds nice actually. It might not be for a little bit yet (got some more design to do first), but send me an email (in my profile) to touch base.
Hey I'm working on the same thing. Right now I only have two rear blinkers hooked up to an arduino and a couple of sensors but I'm slowly building and planning more functionality.
It's a bit sad the lack of attention the rear of the bike receives with current product marketing.
Let me know if you want to develop together (totally understand this is a solo project and you're much further ahead!)
Can you explain a bit more about how this is improving communication between bikes and cars? Auto-on is nice, but we have lights that last a long time already. You mention brake lights. Are you actually riging this up to the bikes breaks? How about turn signalling? Stuff like that?
Clearly, it appears you've hit a thread here, maybe you can share more.
So auto on / off is engaged with a reed switch and spoke mounted magnet. Auto on is more of a user convenience than a battery saver - you never need to think about turning your back lights on again. You will be seen when you ride. The reed switch doubles as a way of determining velocity. When the wheel velocity changes by a certain set amount, the brake lights will engage (three red backlights flash solid, then stay solid). It waits for either an increase in velocity or a time duration to turn the running lights back on. Turning is signaled with front mounted switches (teal switches in the pictures). One on either side of the front light. Currently, they turn on for about 5 seconds then shut off. There's a couple improvements that could be done with it (if stopped, keep blinking until a speed increase), but I haven't done that yet. When blinking is engaged the back lights stop running, the center light stays solid, and the amber LEDs blink at a frequency similar to that of cars. The front light has three modes - on, solid, flashing. Holding down one turn switch will engage the front light, holding down the other turn switch will cycle modes (flashing, solid).
Originally - I wanted it to be accelerometer based, but as you may know, the roads are not very smooth, so any bumps will affect the measurements significantly. The reed switch offers silky smooth data - as the data gets integrated over one wheel rotation, it's extremely noise resistant.
Ah and your main point - communication between cars and cyclists - turn signals allow cars to know where I'm going, the brakes will let them know when I'm slowing, and the automatic lights will make sure they can see me. Be seen, be safe, be smart. It's not a perfect solution, but I think it's a step in the right direction. There's a lot of aggression between cyclists and drivers, this might be something that can allow the driver to anticipate the actions of the cyclist.
Cool! How do you plan to deal with theft? Most bike lights are trivial to steal. I tend to avoid the fancy ones since in my experience lights disappear immediately as soon as the bike's parked (unless I remove them and put them in a bag every time I park, but that's a pain). Curious how you're addressing that.
That's something I only put a little bit of thought into, as I'm not very worried about my bike getting stolen.
It would be non-functional if someone stole it without stealing the magnet and reed switch as well, but they wouldn't know that.
There's a bit of a trade off, as you're going to want to remove the light to charge it up, in that if you want it to remove easy, it will be easy to steal, and if you want it to be hard to steal, it will be a pain to charge. I don't have any solutions for that yet.
That wasn't intended to be the final one, but I made it and it worked. It was printed with support material that peeled off a little too strongly, exfoliating the back surface. The orientation is kind of tricky as there's a lip/groove interface between the front and back of the case which needs to be cosmetically clean to ensure a snug fit, so the only way to get that to work well is to print it with the back down, but there's a 'hood' over the ethernet connector that disallows printing directly onto the back. Slicing with slic3r.
It lets you do multiline stuff, and you get to see the output right away. You don't need let, or to repeat the "main = do ..." every time you want to run a block of code.
I think it's really helpful when you're starting out.