I know things have been very quiet here – I am quite a bit busier with musical activities at the moment and am otherwise chasing paid work, which sadly has meant that Openthing is taking a back seat currently.

I have however been meeting up with fellow freelancer and Open Design advocate Brian Loudon of Loud1 Design. We are working on developing a new project together, hopefully to be disseminated through here and as such I am delighted to welcome him as an author here on Openthing.

So things are just on hold for a bit, but not gone.

Thing are also afoot again with a Glasgow Fablab, so that’s another distraction..

One of the first things I referenced when I started this project was the ‘Maker’s Bill of Rights’ document that Make Magazine published some time ago – a kind of set of standards for makers of open objects such that said objects can be sure to be repairable and hackable. As with most things to do with open design, this seemed to be mainly geared towards open hardware, ie. electronic design, but the tenets are basically good. The document goes like this [the original is here]:

The Maker’s Bill of Rights

If you can’t open it, you don’t own it: a Maker’s Bill of Rights to accessible, extensive, and repairable hardware.

Meaningful and specific parts lists shall be included.

Cases shall be easy to open.

Batteries should be replaceable.

Special tools are allowed only for darn good reasons.

Profiting by selling expensive special tools is wrong and not making special tools available is even worse.

Torx is OK; tamperproof is rarely OK.

Components, not entire sub-assemblies, shall be replaceable.

Consumables, like fuses and filters, shall be easy to access.

Circuit boards shall be commented.

Power from USB is good; power from proprietary power adapters is bad.

Standard connecters shall have pinouts defined.

If it snaps shut, it shall snap open.

Screws better than glues.

Docs and drivers shall have permalinks and shall reside for all perpetuity at archive.org.

Ease of repair shall be a design ideal, not an afterthought.

Metric or standard, not both.

Schematics shall be included.

With Niftymitter, I have a check against all these things, save for the limited use of glues in places, but this document seems to acknowledge them as sometimes unavoidable. I consider a trim tool to be a specialist tool, so am working on getting rid of that (currently need it for tuning niftymitter). Still, the emphasis is clearly on electromechanical design, and not general product design, so I think a more generic version is needed for Open Design (and perhaps a less Americentric title):

An International Standard for Open Design

If you can’t open it, you don’t own it: a standard for accessible, extendable, and repairable products.

Products shall be easy to take apart to the lowest level and put back together without damage. This should ideally be doable by hand alone.

Ease of repair shall be a design ideal, not an afterthought. Components, not entire sub-assemblies, shall be replaceable.

Products shall use materials and components commonly available to the intended user.

Product documentation will actively facilitate alteration of materials or production processes by the user.

Any consumables should be easily accessible and replaceable.

Mechanical fasteners are better than glues.

Special tools are allowed only for very good reasons, and should be easily obtainable unless for the same good reasons.

Design documentation including any software shall have permalinks and shall reside for all perpetuity at archive.org.

Meaningful and specific parts lists shall be included, as well as operating and assembly instructions.

Design documentation will be supplied in its native format as well open formats.

Metric.

Undoubtedly I will add to this as I think of stuff, but have put in the key things I have learned from Niftymitter, and prioritised things as I see them. Niftymitter doesn’t meet these standards yet, but the eradication of glue is a key update for the next version.  Comments welcomed.

Here is my first model of Niftymitter Mic – a cordless mic vresion of niftymitter in response to Nathaniel’s testing.

My initial sketches, done at some point during the symposium.

The mic would be behind that dotty bit in the top left, so you can hold the thing like a dictaphone. I guess it might be good to have the mic part detachable to clip on, but that could just complicate matters. I think if you wanted to do that you;d be better plugging a clip on mic with its own amp into the niftymitter, as was done in the hacking kit.

The bottom opens up to push out the battery tray or circuit box, which are stacked lengthways next to each other.

In the Niftymitter mic arrangement, the cricuit box would be expanded to include an electret mic as described by Tetsuo Kogawa and Andrew. Andrew wanted to add a phantom powered mic socket, but I don’t see that as very necessary. As he said, it would not be that hard to hack a Niftymitter home to do that, but that means that you then can;t plug in a stereo audio signal. Maybe you could have a switch to switch between the two modes.

There is a fold out hook on the back, here made with a big paperclip. I think wire is quite good as it means you can bend the hook to fit the thing you are hooking onto, and it is easy to replace if and when the metal fatigues from repeated bending.

You could also stand the mic on a desk like this.

For those of you who can’t make it.

There are three tables, one on the theme of Download, one on Make & Adapt, and one on Share.

And a nice big vinyl cut on the wall.

Malcolm’s beautiful promo photo blown up.

The Share table. There are now the A5 cards with the testers’ results on them here, and a batch of blank cards in case anyone wants to leave ideas.

The Make & Adapt table, prior to me being there.

The download table. The website is now open on the terminal.

The source on CDR and printed out. All the CDs were taken during the symposium, so it will be interesting to see what people make of that.

The parts and hacking kit laid out on the Make & Adapt table.

The niftymitter on one of Gerry’s crisp plynths.

Amusingly, my job title throughout the promo has been taken as (post-)industrial designer, and here they even dropped the deliberate brackets. That took some explaining, which was hard as I really haven’t given the title that much thought, but was a good exercise none the less in what is meant by post-industrialism!

And here is the place after I descended this morning. Nice and messy, with the niftymitter hooked up to the laptop, which is now broadcasting Adam Buxton’s Big Mix Tape from the weekend.

Before I came up for the exhibition I did a bit of quick layout development on Niftymitter Home in the hope that it might be ready for the exhibition. It wasn’t, but things are in a good place I think:

It sits quite well in either horizontal orientation – which is how the 0.24 versions seemed to fall.

It is a bit thicker as the circuit board has been rotated, which is perhaps why it sits quite comfortably in this vertical orientation too.

The sleeve somehow ended up too long when I was doing the laser cutting. I could lose a good 5mm off the length. This is the cavity at the bottom through which one can push out the battery tray and circuit box.

And here are the controls from the front: tuning, volume and power, from left to right.

It didn’t sit that easily in this orientation due to the weight of the cable.

So the layouts are pretty close, the circuit box needed a lot of rejigging and I still need to check that this actually worked. The bigger issue is getting the volume and tuning controls working, still need a good solution for the knobs/dials, I’d rather not use off the shelf knobs/dials, and there don’t seem to be any trimcaps designed for these in any case. I think a glued solution may be the only way to go here.

Hello. I am in the exhibition space in the Dalhousie building at Dundee University from 9-5 today and tomorrow, do pop in and say hello. This morning I have been mainly re-broadcasting Solid Steel in the exhibition space and working up a version of niftymitter with a built in mic in response to Nathaniel’s results. It occurs to me I may not have posted Nathaniel’s results, so here they are in the card form that is used in the exhibition. Nathaniel’s responses were beautifully hand written and drawn out, using the niftymitter mainly as a cordless mic.

There are currently exams being sat in the Dalhousie building, and was wondering if anyone in the exam might pick up my broadcasts – only if they were very confident and have time to listen to radio 2 during the exam I suppose. I guess niftymitter could be put to dubious use as an aid to cheating in exams though..

Have just come across this Open Design event happening in Berlin this week, from the Open Design Berlin blog:

The DMY Maker Lab will be a celebration of Open Design through practice, presentations, and collaborative action, created by instigators and participants alike. It’ll be held at the DMY International Design Festival from 9-13 June 2010.

Berlin seems to be a hive of activity in this area, with their own fablab entitled Open Design City, and a very successful Social Media week, which I blogged about earlier in the year.

The Maker Lab’s programme looks jam packed full of good stuff, wish I could be in two places at once (or three in the case of Wednesday night, that way I could make the opening of the Dundee exhibition too)!

I’ve been busy preparing stuff for the exhibition in Dundee this week that ties up my Arts Council funded residency with DJCAD. The exhibition is called Innovation and Creative Development in Craft and runs from Thursday 10th June to Saturday 26th June in the Dalhousie Building, University of Dundee, Old Hawkhill, Balfour Street, Dundee, DD1 4HB.

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I am planning an installation that is part documentation of the Niftymitter development that happened over the autumn, and part hacking workshop, so I should be around the exhbition on and off during that period. Do pop in and say hello! It’s a tricky thing to introduce an audience to Open Design and to explain a product at the same time, so we’ll see how well that goes. I think the former is more important for me, so the emphasis is probably there.

As part of the exhibit I’ll be showing the results from my six testers and inviting the audience to contribute their ideas for niftymitter too. These results I’m having printed onto A5 cards – if you’d like to take a look the pdf is here. Here is an example:

I’m also making up some CD-Rs with the 0.24 source on them for people to take away, and have bundled in a free MP3 by one of my bands, Inspector Tapehead. Seemed to make sense, as a wee something to test your transmitter with once you’ve made it! This is a wee homage to what I see as the increasing similarity between DIY music production and the DIY production of things that Open Design aspires to. It’s quite common for musicians to make up their own releases for promo purposes, so why not designers? The question is whether Niftymitter or its equivalents will ever make it onto iTunes!

Anyway will post pics of the exhibit as soon as its ready.

Have made some progress today with the two next versions of Niftymitter:  The plan is to update the general PCB layout from 0.24/0.25, add the volume attenuator feature and improve the tuning interaction, and call this Niftymitter Guts, which will be v0.3.

Then am working on two new sleeve designs: one for the home, called Home,  and a more robust one, which I have called Gig. Images below. The Home version is a development of the original Niftymitter, oriented slightly differently as I previously blogged about, first pic below. The Gig will be a makerbottable ABS sleeve, second below.. (or other 3D print). Should be good.

Both have employed a new assumption, that is that the transmitter be used in the horizontal orientation shown – testing showed that the vertical orientation that I previously assumed was not at all what the object wanted to do! So the new one will sit flat, with the audio input coming in from one side. The gig version will be reversible so that the jack can come in from either side.

In other news, I received Andrew’s unit back this week, and am making preparations for the imminent PPFCP exhibition in Dundee. The results of the testing have been a mixed bag, have had same great suggestions and responses from a few a testers, but has been very quiet from others, and not nearly as much hacking as I had hoped for. I have been thinking about why this might have been, and there are numerous possible reasons, but am unsure which is the most significant. Any comments welcomed as always, particularly from the testers themselves.

Gone for a taped construction on this one, while its still in development. Quite pleased with the form, would be good as a household radio for a kitchen or bathroom, but not so good portability wise. Will post up the layouts asap.

As I said before, have had real trouble getting a decent board for the guts so ended up hacking open one of these:

Lloytron N706 AM/FM Portable Radio

So its either reverse engineer the board for open sourcing, or come up with a new board for the next one..