This week has been all about Poem/1 embedded code and server code – peering down both ends of the telescope as it were. I’ve been working with Tom Armitage which is always such a pleasure.
(You can now send notes to the clock, and hit the button on top to like poems. It sets the timezone automatically with a manual override on the website dashboard.)
Tom told me about an unusual situation faced by Teenage Engineering with their new EP-133 K.O.II sampler…
Fadergate:
Since the sampler’s release in November 2023, a noticeable number of customers have complained of the effects fader becoming suddenly unresponsive.
The effects fader is a slider on the left of the device.
There’s always some damage in shipping, and of course all the products were QA’d before leaving the factory, yet: We could guess that you get transport damage, but not at this rate.
What was it? This: the box looked something like a vinyl record.
David Eriksson, Teenage Engineering co-founder:
“The size of the box is 10 inches, so some stores thought it was a 10-inch vinyl package and so shipped it without padding. But it was also our little design flaw; we didn’t have any protection, and if something hit the packaging straight on the fader, it would break. Now that’s been changed.”
Two thoughts:
- That’s a tough break. The folks at Teenage Engineering know what they’re doing, they will have done everything right re packaging. Who would have guessed that people’s assumptions given the shape and size of the thing would cause havoc?
- See the way Eriksson straightforwardly takes accountability there. Kudos.
It reminds me a shipping snafu with SVK, the amazing comic book by Warren Ellis and Matt Brooker that we published at BERG, from Jack Schulze’s original concept, way back in 2011.
Here are the blog posts about SVK.
The macguffin in the story is a device that make people’s thoughts visible – as words floating above their heads. Thought bubbles, of course, in the outer reality of the reader.
And the comic shipped with an ultraviolet flashlight.
The comic was printed with an extra, invisible UV ink. (Which I seem to remember had some particular security around it because they don’t want it used for counterfeiting?) So you had this double layer.
ANYWAY.
Shipping.
The flashlights were flat, credit card-sized, push to activate. So they slipped easily into the shipping envelope.
You can see where this is going.
When the comics were packaged, and then when the packages were boxed, and then when the ones at the ends were squeezed, some of the flashlights would activate inside the envelopes and the batteries would run down, and comics with dead UV flashlights went through many letterboxes.
You wouldn’t believe how much prep and risk mitigation we’d done up-front.
Yet I remember tracking the percentage failure rate. Oof.
We shipped a lot of replacements.
The second printing had the flashlights in an extra bubblewrap pouch.
You can never tell with physical things.
In 2015 I built a bookshop in a vending machine called Machine Supply. It tweeted every time it sold a book. It was the smallest member of the industry Booksellers Association; it was featured on BBC News; etc.
So when you go into a bookshop and there are little cards by some of the books with a personal note about why the book is great? Those are called shelf talkers.
Shelf talkers were a big part of Machine Supply. All the books were stocked based on personal recommendations.
The shelf talkers attached to the shelves inside the machine, visible through the window, each just below its book.
BUT.
A vending machine is basically a fridge – you want your soda ice cold.
Refrigeration is noisy, so we turned it off. The machine lived in the lobby of Google Campus, or Hachette UK HQ, so it had to be quiet.
Now, being fridges, vending machines are well insulated.
They’re also well lit. The lights make the inside of the machine warm.
After a week, very warm.
Many adhesives fail when warm. Including the adhesives I used to attach the shelf talkers.
They all fell off. One by one.
I can’t remember how many different adhesives I tried before I found one which (a) continued to be sticky over the whole temperature range, yet (b) still let me peel off the shelf talkers at stock turnover time.
In the end it was double-sided Sellotape.
Many such cases!
The utter breadth and fractal level of detail with hardware is wild, especially connected hardware, and then there’s AI too. I am in the thick of it right now with Poem/1, me and my high-dynamic-range to-do list, and I love it.
This week there has been
- a back-and-forth between industrial design and the factory re the placement of the screws on the back, where we want equal horizontal and vertical margins for the aesthetic vs structural support for the injection moulded plastic.
- a debate about where to put timezone config dropdown, weighing up firmware complexity vs designing a smooth out of box experience vs the reliability (and longevity) of server-side geocoding.
- debugging the internal power cable extension, learning about USB PD and the USB 3 spec, trying to understand why the cable works with some cables and not others, and then how to give feedback to the contract manufacturer when everything I say is going through machine translation.
- then with the same cable, the concern that it might be an “unintentional radiator”, i.e. an accidental antenna that leaks radio noise, and looking ahead to product certification and wanting to mitigate future risks in emissions testing by making the best decisions today.
- designing the notes feature, that is how the user can send themselves custom text to appear on the e-paper screen, which was a feature we added during the Kickstarter campaign. The main thing is to call it “notes,” which implies that it’s like a note on the proverbial fridge, replacing any previous notes, rather than “messages,” which would imply a history and an inbox.
There are so many moments when I just step back and think: oh, it turns out I have to have a considered opinion about THIS specific and esoteric point now.
Also for many months I have been obsessed with the finish of the e-paper screen.
As it comes from the supplier, an e-paper screen is high gloss and slightly soft. That makes for hard reflections of any local light source. So ugly. The reflections ripple slightly.
I want a matte finish.
And have you tried describing that via machine translation without any appropriately-priced reference material or a specific solution in mind? Yeah it’s been a journey. I care so much about this.
We can’t afford custom textured tempered glass; putting a transparent ABS cover on the e-paper creates distance and loses the magic of the display.
Anyway – my contract manufacturers have found a matte finish screen protector that can be applied as a film. I sent Alibaba links, they found it in the markets.
The sample arrived in a parcel from Taiwan on Monday. We applied it on a test screen on Tuesday.
It is gorgeous. Exactly what I wanted.
My goodness the joy of seeing that new screen finish! I can’t stop thinking about it. The prospect of not finding a part, in budget, has been weighing on me so badly.
Who knows who else will notice haha.
I could bend your ear for 30 minutes about any of a thousand different aspects of this project.
I’m not doing this on my own.
A huge part of the pleasure is to work with super talented specialists. Often, just to watch them work.
So some bits I know, and some bits mainly I need to have enough of a literacy to talk to the people who actually know.
And all the micro decisions touch all the other micro decisions. You can be four levels deep in a decision tree about user experience and it has a major two-way connection with some far-flung part of the project to do with, I don’t know, supplier negotiations, or server stack, or the P&L five years out.
(The unexpected availability of a particular request header on the server totally changed some UX calculus which meant a big change of direction in the firmware development.)
Meanwhile, if I’m not blocking on some particular task, I’m thinking ahead to the next stages, or harmonised customs codes or whatever, and what I can start doing now to get ahead…
And knowing that something weird might go wrong, like the boxes are piled too high and the bottom ones get crushed, or the temperature makes some glue not tacky enough, or too sticky, or…
I love it, I love it.
It is ridiculous and wonderful to be able to do this, it’s so wide and so deep and so detailed, and I’m so grateful to all the very many incredible people I’ve worked with over the years - on Little Printer at BERG especially, and then as advisor with Beeline and Tech Will Save Us - because I’ve absorbed by osmosis some tiny fraction of those skills, just by proximity I think. Being in the same room as great people is such a privilege.
Really I want to do more connected hardware. But if I talk about that any more you need to stage an intervention, ok.
It’s better than last time I suppose. The e-paper test farm for the clocks is relatively contained and lives on a shelf. The vending machine was 270kg, a dog to move around, and the house was full of boxes of stock and machine parts and bulky spare shelf helixes.
This week has been all about Poem/1 embedded code and server code – peering down both ends of the telescope as it were. I’ve been working with Tom Armitage which is always such a pleasure.
(You can now send notes to the clock, and hit the button on top to like poems. It sets the timezone automatically with a manual override on the website dashboard.)
Tom told me about an unusual situation faced by Teenage Engineering with their new EP-133 K.O.II sampler…
Fadergate:
The effects fader is a slider on the left of the device.
There’s always some damage in shipping, and of course all the products were QA’d before leaving the factory, yet:
What was it? This: the box looked something like a vinyl record.
David Eriksson, Teenage Engineering co-founder:
Two thoughts:
It reminds me a shipping snafu with SVK, the amazing comic book by Warren Ellis and Matt Brooker that we published at BERG, from Jack Schulze’s original concept, way back in 2011.
Here are the blog posts about SVK.
The macguffin in the story is a device that make people’s thoughts visible – as words floating above their heads. Thought bubbles, of course, in the outer reality of the reader.
And the comic shipped with an ultraviolet flashlight.
The comic was printed with an extra, invisible UV ink. (Which I seem to remember had some particular security around it because they don’t want it used for counterfeiting?) So you had this double layer.
ANYWAY.
Shipping.
The flashlights were flat, credit card-sized, push to activate. So they slipped easily into the shipping envelope.
You can see where this is going.
When the comics were packaged, and then when the packages were boxed, and then when the ones at the ends were squeezed, some of the flashlights would activate inside the envelopes and the batteries would run down, and comics with dead UV flashlights went through many letterboxes.
You wouldn’t believe how much prep and risk mitigation we’d done up-front.
Yet I remember tracking the percentage failure rate. Oof.
We shipped a lot of replacements.
The second printing had the flashlights in an extra bubblewrap pouch.
You can never tell with physical things.
In 2015 I built a bookshop in a vending machine called Machine Supply. It tweeted every time it sold a book. It was the smallest member of the industry Booksellers Association; it was featured on BBC News; etc.
So when you go into a bookshop and there are little cards by some of the books with a personal note about why the book is great? Those are called shelf talkers.
Shelf talkers were a big part of Machine Supply. All the books were stocked based on personal recommendations.
The shelf talkers attached to the shelves inside the machine, visible through the window, each just below its book.
BUT.
A vending machine is basically a fridge – you want your soda ice cold.
Refrigeration is noisy, so we turned it off. The machine lived in the lobby of Google Campus, or Hachette UK HQ, so it had to be quiet.
Now, being fridges, vending machines are well insulated.
They’re also well lit. The lights make the inside of the machine warm.
After a week, very warm.
Many adhesives fail when warm. Including the adhesives I used to attach the shelf talkers.
They all fell off. One by one.
I can’t remember how many different adhesives I tried before I found one which (a) continued to be sticky over the whole temperature range, yet (b) still let me peel off the shelf talkers at stock turnover time.
In the end it was double-sided Sellotape.
Many such cases!
The utter breadth and fractal level of detail with hardware is wild, especially connected hardware, and then there’s AI too. I am in the thick of it right now with Poem/1, me and my high-dynamic-range to-do list, and I love it.
This week there has been
There are so many moments when I just step back and think: oh, it turns out I have to have a considered opinion about THIS specific and esoteric point now.
Also for many months I have been obsessed with the finish of the e-paper screen.
As it comes from the supplier, an e-paper screen is high gloss and slightly soft. That makes for hard reflections of any local light source. So ugly. The reflections ripple slightly.
I want a matte finish.
And have you tried describing that via machine translation without any appropriately-priced reference material or a specific solution in mind? Yeah it’s been a journey. I care so much about this.
We can’t afford custom textured tempered glass; putting a transparent ABS cover on the e-paper creates distance and loses the magic of the display.
Anyway – my contract manufacturers have found a matte finish screen protector that can be applied as a film. I sent Alibaba links, they found it in the markets.
The sample arrived in a parcel from Taiwan on Monday. We applied it on a test screen on Tuesday.
It is gorgeous. Exactly what I wanted.
My goodness the joy of seeing that new screen finish! I can’t stop thinking about it. The prospect of not finding a part, in budget, has been weighing on me so badly.
Who knows who else will notice haha.
I could bend your ear for 30 minutes about any of a thousand different aspects of this project.
I’m not doing this on my own.
A huge part of the pleasure is to work with super talented specialists. Often, just to watch them work.
So some bits I know, and some bits mainly I need to have enough of a literacy to talk to the people who actually know.
And all the micro decisions touch all the other micro decisions. You can be four levels deep in a decision tree about user experience and it has a major two-way connection with some far-flung part of the project to do with, I don’t know, supplier negotiations, or server stack, or the P&L five years out.
(The unexpected availability of a particular request header on the server totally changed some UX calculus which meant a big change of direction in the firmware development.)
Meanwhile, if I’m not blocking on some particular task, I’m thinking ahead to the next stages, or harmonised customs codes or whatever, and what I can start doing now to get ahead…
And knowing that something weird might go wrong, like the boxes are piled too high and the bottom ones get crushed, or the temperature makes some glue not tacky enough, or too sticky, or…
I love it, I love it.
It is ridiculous and wonderful to be able to do this, it’s so wide and so deep and so detailed, and I’m so grateful to all the very many incredible people I’ve worked with over the years - on Little Printer at BERG especially, and then as advisor with Beeline and Tech Will Save Us - because I’ve absorbed by osmosis some tiny fraction of those skills, just by proximity I think. Being in the same room as great people is such a privilege.
Really I want to do more connected hardware. But if I talk about that any more you need to stage an intervention, ok.
It’s better than last time I suppose. The e-paper test farm for the clocks is relatively contained and lives on a shelf. The vending machine was 270kg, a dog to move around, and the house was full of boxes of stock and machine parts and bulky spare shelf helixes.