How Not to Design Reasonably

One of the fails going around the internet is Juicero, which is selling a press to squeeze raw juices from its pouches into a cup.

This press recently had its price reduced to "only" $400, for a juicer.

What's more reporters at Bloomberg discovered that you could get about the same amount of juice from the pouches using the Mark 1 human hand.

Not bad for a company that has raised $120 million in VC funding  ……… For a juice squeezer.

After all of this product designer Ben Einstein did a a disassembly and a deep dive, and  he found a ridiculously over-designed mess.

The short version is that there is a press using a custom motor and custom gear train, a half dozen machined aluminum parts which drives an aluminum plate against the pouch to uniformly apply pressure.

Einstein inventoried the following:

• An extremely complex plastic molding, including co-molded parts.
• A heavy custom machined aluminum frame.
• A custom power supply.
• Massive custom hinges on the door.
• Custom sliders.
• A very robust custom gearbox.  
• Etc.

Looking at this problem, I immediately have a better way of doing things.

I could make a prototype using an off the shelf aquarium pump for less than $100 in in parts.  (It would work like the so called "Neat Squeeze" toothpaste tube), or do something similar with a store bought pasta maker retailing for $29.99.

That took me all of 15 minutes to think about it.

This is all of Silicon Valley dysfunction in a squeezable pouch.

If I am Sounding a Bit Incoherent, It's Because I am a Bit Incoherent

Major deadline at work, and I put in 14 hours today.

I got everything done that I needed to do today, but I am completely knackered.

Tomorrow should be fascinating. (Not snarking here)

More on That Zeppo Thing

Basically, I was trying to come up with a way of holding two things together that would allow for simple installation and removal of a payload on top of a mast.

After coming up with a number of rather ugly potential solutions, I remembered that Zeppo (Herbert) Marx had developed a clamp in his post showbiz career as an Engineer and manufacturer, developing the Marman Clamp^* (pictured), which found extensive use as a stage separation mechanism in space craft in addition to securing the "Fat Man" inside the B-29 "Bock's Car" when it dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

The clamp, plus a couple of pins for alignment, and I had a solution that was clean, dirt cheap, robust, and nearly soldier proof.^†

Needless to say, I am feeling rather smug about this.

^*It appears that Zeppo did not invent the clamp, but rather he was the one to bring it to mass production.

^†Nothing can be made soldier proof. It simply can be made somewhat soldier resistant.

Could My Relatives Please Confirm Who Sent Which T-Shirt?

OK, I know that Dad sent me this, because it came with gummy worms:


But who sent me this one?


Sometimes, Chanukah is confusing.

Huh, Neat Tech

It appears that machining titanium at cryogenic temperatures extends tool life:

Cryogenic titanium machining improves cutting-tool life by a factor of 10 with appropriate material removal processing speed. The Joint Program Office in coordination with the F-35 Fracture Control Board (FCB) approved the new process for standard roughing operations, impacting the most time-consuming and cost-intensive machining processes associated with manufacturing titanium parts. Broadly applied, this new technology could improve affordability and efficiency in the production of the F-35, which is approximately 25 percent titanium by weight.

My guess would that this generates smaller chips, that it might prevent material from adhering (galling, welding, etc.) to the tools, and it might slow the formation of an oxide coating, but I'd love to hear the theory behind it.

I would make an observation here:  If you have an aircraft that is 25% by weight titanium, you have a very expensive aircraft.

It's Been a Weird Year for the Auto Industry

Play them off, Jon Stewart

With the recall of more than 6½ million to repair a sticky accelerator pedal, Toyota's sales fell by 47% from December, and 16% year over year, which was enough for both Ford and GM outsell to outsell the Japanese car firm.

Of course, we now know that it's not just accelerator pedals, but also the brakes on its Prius hybrid, where it appears to be a software issue that creates unsteady breaking in the interplay between regenerative and mechanical braking.

It may not be any consolation to the Toyoda family, but Ford just rolled out a software update for its hybrid vehicles:

Ford Motor Co. announced Thursday that it will ask owners of its Ford Fusion Hybrid and Mercury Milan Hybrids sedan to bring their car into their Ford dealer to replace software that operates the car's braking system.

While the cars maintain full braking ability, Ford said, drivers may occasionally experience a strange feeling in the brakes under certain circumstances.

So the latest problems may be an artifact of the move to "drive by wire" technologies for hybrid vehicles, you pretty much have to, because managing the battery/engine balance cannot be done manually by the driver.

In any case, the juxtaposxition of glitches in software and automotive hardware, it seems appropriate to invoke the proven to be false by Snopes joke:

At a computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release (by Mr. Welch himself) stating:

---

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason at all, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally, executing a manoeuver such as a left-turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, and you would have to reinstall the engine.
4. When your car died on the freeway for no reason, you would just accept this, restart and drive on.
5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought 'Car95' or 'CarNT', and then added more seats.
6. Apple would make a car powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would run on only five per cent of the roads.
7. Oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single 'general car default' warning light.
8. New seats would force every-one to have the same size butt.
9. The airbag would say 'Are you sure?' before going off.
10. Occasionally, for no reason, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed the radio antenna.
11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of road maps from Rand-McNally (a subsidiary of GM), even though they neither need them nor want them. Trying to delete this option would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50 per cent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.
12. Every time GM introduced a new model, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
13. You would press the 'start' button to shut off the engine.

Everything old is weird again.