Another #MAKE Friday

To follow on to our last MAKE project, we got interested in what other metrics we could display in creative ways. Again, we went to look at some less traditional measurements at my company, that reinforced or highlight the company values. It's interesting to display revenue or shipments. But we have plenty of ways to do that already with intelligent and mobile dashboards, etc. 

Our head of HR suggested that we pick up the hours of volunteer time our colleagues contribute: as a standard policy, everybody at my company gets a paid day a year to volunteer at whatever charitable organization or institute is meaningful to them. It's one of my favorite benefits (obviously. Twice.) But the reality is that not enough people actually remember to do it.  

If we make the metric more visible, would we see that change?

I have to think so. The pages printed has gone down since we deployed the cube. I think we can have an even greater effect on this fantastic benefit as well. 

What I really wanted to create was a split-flap display - like you would see in old train stations. The clatter and the action of the split-flap is just fantastic. It draws you in, and strikes a chord with me because of the audible reinforcement of seeing the information change. Unfortunately, everyone has ripped those things out some years ago to switch to digital screens (yawn), and they're nigh-impossible to find. (although I did find one or two examples of building them entirely from scratch. But even I'm not that ambitious).   Sure, you can fake it on a big screen, but that just didn't tug on my creative urges enough. 

So we kicked this idea around for a while with the team, looking for an alternative idea that blended that tactile attraction, but was simple enough to do in the spare time of the few of us who were working on it. 

One of the programmers on my team had a couple of old, cheap Android-based tablets. he made one of them into a single digit flipper and showed it to me. Voila.  

Let's just pile up a bunch of individual screens to do the trick, create a web service to change each counter, and nest the whole thing in something that 'softened' the digital aspect of the display. We bought a few more old tablets, and I took one of the leftover rafters from our 300 year old farmhouse that had been taken out and saved in my barn to create a cradle.  We spray painted the non-screen parts of the tablet a uniform matte black to further take away the digital reminders (no buttons or logos needed), and a colleague from my team and I set it up in the hallway of the main office without telling anyone what it was. 

We let it sit there for a week or so, displaying a number (267), smiling enigmatically when people asked about it.  Our CEO was giving some partners from another company a tour - even with all of the art and scientific instrumentation surrounding it, this stood out enough for them to ask about it. 

It wasn't labeled. It was just a set of numbers. It made people ask. 

That's exactly what we wanted.  

After about ten days, we released another video - I wrote the script, but yet another one of our team voiced it. Again, I think this said it better.  

The flip counter meter we created with some re-purposed android tablets and a little creative app writing.

This one was a great collaboration amongst my team. It was fun to see how into it different people got, and certainly met the objective of both producing something that combined utility, creativity and artfulness, and of getting the team inspired to innovate and think differently.

We've got another project on the design board that'll combine a couple of the best parts of each of these.  

More fun to come!  

You can tell the quality of the science by the scale of the props involved

Back in the fall, my Bride & I went in to the Critter's 5th grade class to teach chemistry for the day. Which was rich in irony, as I struggled to find the joy in chemistry when I was a student. But the experience itself was fun - fifth graders are at that great age where they're young enough that they're not too cool to express interest in a subject, and old enough that you can make fun of them without creating a need for lasting therapy.  I told the teachers when they hit the physics & engineering segment of the curriculum, let me know. That's my wheelhouse, and I had a couple of ideas I thought might be fun. 

Here is a truckful of ideas:

I asked the teachers how many kids to expect, and if we could consolidate the classes. I enjoyed the smaller groups of individual classes for the dry ice demonstrations in the fall. But with the larger catapults, we needed to move outside (for obvious reasons), and I was a bit worried about the higher likelihood of catastrophic breakdown. Which is a lesson of a different kind, I suppose. 

Soon enough, the first horde of kids were crossing the field. 

My lesson plan was more or less as follows: 

• Intro: Simple machines, Complex machines, and Hurling Produce
• The basic lever in your arm - come up and throw a potato
• Extending the lever - a lacrosse stick hurls potatoes further
• The Slingshot - using potential energy in a device to save my rotator cuff because I am old
• How the Romans did it - A torsion engine, an onager, and an intro to siege warfare
• Le Trebuchet - Counterweights & hurling bigger produce with an improved design
• The Potato Cannon - The chemical potential energy of Aquanet, and a really loud noise 

There was a lot of improvisation in this basic plan, but I showed up with a tub full of cabbages, a couple of watermelons and sacks of potatoes, and figured we could make a go of it. 

I showed up an hour early to set up. I had promised the Critter that I would do my best to embarrass her, so I brought an extra prop or two along. I did a good portion of the lecture while wearing my Roman legionnaire helmet.  The other kids seemed to dig it. 

(Someone in the school administration office asked me 'Where did you ever find that helmet!?'  To which I answered: On the internet, I am two clicks away from just about anything.)

The sling shot and lacrosse sticks served as simple ways to get the kids up and into the action: we'd hurl about half a sack of potatoes down range, and then other kids were jumping to volunteer to run down and collect them. Honestly, I probably didn't have to do anything more than let the kids play with this for an hour, but I had a few other props prepared, so we moved it along.  

I knew from the get go that I wanted to make another catapult. Bigger this time, and more durable. So I started with the same basic plan, and scaled it up a couple of notches. I scavenged some wheels off a non-functioning wagon, and added more cross-bracing. 

Soon enough, I had a working potato-onager. 

I actually ended up modifying this further. The onager is under a lot of stress, and has a bad tendency to shake itself apart after a few throws.

I switched out the arm for a metal pipe, and added a more durable & functional sling to the end to give it the arc & trajectory I wanted. 

This is me, apparently incorporating an explanation of how the Bangles had a hit song in the mid-80's with such a stupid song. 

By comparison, the trebuchet was simple to build. And a lot bigger. It only took me a couple of hours to knock it together, and scrounge about 125 lbs of weight to serve as a counterweight. (I knew those dumb bells would eventually come in handy).

I had the kids throw some cabbages by hand for comparison, and then we tried launching them from le trebuchet.  

The trebuchet won. 

Then we upped the ante, and launched a watermelon. 

It was almost 90 degrees out. The kids spontaneously chased the smashed watermelon and scooped it up off the grass as a treat. 

We ended with a potato cannon that I borrowed from one of my colleagues. I've never built one, though I've thought about it a couple of times. (there are countless versions of them on the internet). 

A little bit of PVC, some aquanet and a click-starter from a Weber, and you've got a pretty serious projectile demonstration. 

It's also loud. Which makes it even more fun. 

Once again, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the book 'The Art of the Catapult' by William Gurstelle. There's nothing here that took more than a few hours to knock together, and provided a huge amount of fun, and hopefully some tactile examples of some of the hardcore physics concepts that the kids will remember, and maybe want to learn more about.  And of course to the teachers for inviting us in to make a fool of ourselves throwing various forms of produce around the field for an afternoon. 

Plus: It gave me an excuse to buy a legionnaire’s  helmet. 

Everybody wins. 

#MAKE Friday - Ambient Cube

Late last year, I had begun thinking about some new ways to communicate information across my company. I am fascinated by a) taking information that you either rarely (or never) look at and making it more available, and b) bored with bar charts. 

There's a lot of ways to communicate information. But we seem to get stuck in the same ways old ways we have always used, because they seem simple, we've trained ourselves to use them, and so we reach for them out of convenience. But with the sheer amount of information available to us at any given time, putting more data into the firehose won't result in anything actionable or noticeable unless it's either truly compelling, or interesting enough to stand out. 

I was taken with the idea of the ambient orb, and began playing around with ways to build one myself. It took a little bit of finessing to figure out exactly how I wanted to set it up. The biggest challenge is to get enough light out of the LEDs to be visible in all situations. A single LED just isn't gonna cut it when the sun is up and shining through the window.  But just as importantly as the technical aspects, I was determined to make the object pretty. It had to fit into the ambience of the area I intended to put it - the lobby of a multi-million dollar scientific facility, surrounded by works of art and natural beauty. 

So of course, I turned it from an orb to a cube. 

The lighting was brightened by using a BlinkM MaxM LED - a stupidly bright RGB LED that is super easy to work with. I tore apart carefully disassembeled an old, non-programmable ambient orb to see how they had tackled the diffusion. Answer: frosted wax paper. Engineers are a practical people. The cube came from some $5 Amazon toy - I threw all the functional part of it away, and just kept the plastic cubey bit. 

Now for the base. I took a piece of burl buckeye that I had in my workshop, and carved back the suface to accomodate the cube. I haven't done much carving, but I love working with this wood. I've made some small box parts out of it in the past, and it is both light and dense (a great combination for woodworking, but a bitch on the sawblades). Best of all, it has a gorgeous natural grain that is warm and interesting. 

Never mind the rust on my chisel. My barn isn't hermetically sealed, and it's a constant battle with my steel tools. 

I routed out the underside of the block to accomodate the arduino board and components (I installed an ethernet shield on it as well), and drilled a hole through the center of the square cutout to slip the LED through. Then it was just a matter of plopping the cube into the slot. 

It still didn't look quite finished to me. I also knew I'd be putting it out into a rather sunny location. Even with the MaxM LED, in direct sunlight, it has to be pretty bright to be seen. So I grabbed a small sheet of stock rolled brass, and bent it into a shade. To keep with the artsy feel, I used a torch to discolor and oxidize the brass a bit. 

Added bonus: Fire! 

The little sketch I wrote for the cube can be found here - pretty straightforward (you will need the BlinkM_funcs.h and WebServer.h libraries as well). But you set the IP of the ethernet sheild, pass the color you want the cube to turn in standard RGB values via a webservice, and it shifts prettily to the next shade.

Several applications of danish oil to protect the base and And boom. We have ourselves a remotely programmable ambient cube, that can automatically be set to change as any metric we choose to monitor shifts. Here it's set to "purple." 

The idea for the metric is simple. We picked paper usage for the campus, because environmental stewardship is an important core value for our organization.  But we could've picked pretty much any goal.  If the cube is red, we used less paper yesterday than we did the day before.  If it's blue, we used about the same. If it's green, we used less. 

While we played with different and more complicated algorithms, the goal is just to do a little better every day. If we do that, it adds up to thousands of pages saved each year.  The numbers are easy - our print servers record every print job by printer, sender, page type, etc. anyway. All we had do to was setup a simple automatic comparison, and send out a little nightly web call to the cube. 

By putting it out in the lobby to be seen as people walk in each morning, it becomes both a visible reminder of our core values as an organization, and an opportunity to reflect on our choices. 'Oh. Today is a red day. Maybe I won't make as many copies of that report, and will just email it instead.'

But we said it better in a video - I put this together for internal communication. It explains the concept and the meaning. 

And there you have it. Information presented in an interesting fashion that becomes actionable, for less than fifty bucks and a few hours of effort to put together.