Category Archives: Company Blog

Rapid Prototyping with Legos®

Posted on by Brian Noland

It seems like every day we read about the latest and greatest 3D printer that is hitting the “makersphere.”  Kickstarter had 25 3D-printer-related projects listed at the date this blog was written, many that promise to put a 3D printer in your hands for under $500!  With the advent of cheap and ubiquitous 3D printers, the tendency of makers out there is to jump to 3D printed models first.  However, much time and plastic can be wasted in the earliest stages trying to learn the rules of a design as the designer cycles through print after print.  I believe that Legos® can often times fill the gap between your initial ideas and those first higher-resolution models (eg. 3D-printed, or SLA models).

 

You remember Legos® right?  Nearly every kid had a set (or 20 sets like me).  When I was a kid, I was deep into space Legos®.  Several Christmases and birthdays combined left me with quite the collection when I finally outgrew them.  Luckily, when I moved out to go to college, my parents kept my old bins of space Legos® so that I might pass them onto my own kids.  In fact, that very thing happened.  My parents gave me back my bins of Legos® and they were passed onto my kids, who still play with them years later.

 

Fast forward to the Summer of 2011, when I decided to act upon an idea that I had for converting the iPhone into a mobile laboratory.  I was just hearing about the renaissance in 3D printing and was about to invest in a printer or hire contract printing companies in order to realize some of my design ideas.  Then it clicked.  Those bins of Legos® surfaced in my mind and it was clear that the place to start fleshing out my first meter was with a Lego® scaffold.  I began playing around with various basic designs and arrived at one that allowed me to ask several design questions at once.  This became the launching point for a design effort that took several months to arrive at a great industrial design with the help from the highly creative folks at Speck Design of Palo Alto.

Legos® have several attributes that I believe make them a powerful early rapid prototyping platform:

    • inexpensive
    • accessible
    • modular
    • instantly recyclable
    • cloneable designs
    • mechanical features (swivels, hinges, wheels, pulleys, levers, etc.)
    • more expensive kits offer essentially robotic functionality (Lego® Mindstorms)

If you cant find exactly the piece you need, it is not terribly expensive to cut existing pieces or glue additional functionality to existing pieces to augment their native capabilities.  One major downside is that Legos® have a rather low resolution for design features.  However, if you need finer detail, consider building a scaled model with Legos®.

 

I was too quick to deem myself clever in making use of Legos® in design as many others had already beaten me to the punch.  The very large and well known design firm IDEO has mentioned their use of Legos in their design process in several places.  Dr Craig Lawrence, an IDEO engineer, said in an Ask Magazine feature on IDEO:

 “One of my favorite tools for rapid prototyping is Lego®. These ubiquitous children’s toys are a great way to prototype fairly complex mechanisms. During the development of a medical instrument, an IDEO team used Legos to prototype several concepts for a mechanism to convert continuous rotary motion into reciprocating linear motion. These prototypes clearly could not be used for surgery, but they are great for allowing an engineer to visualize a concept and work through some of the complex details rapidly.”

 There is also a link on the OpenIDEO website which makes specific mention of Lego® Serious Play Kits.

 

There is an interesting how-to article on making a Lego case for the Raspberry Pi ARM computer from a young girl named Biz on the Raspberry Pi web site.  I also found an article on some Cal Tech students who used a Lego® core in order to build a smartphone-enabled device to monitor mammalian cells in culture (link).  In an odd twist of fate, I found a video of a Lego® Mindstorm 3D printer:

In actuality, this machine is an automated Lego® model assembler, but I am sure the actual Lego® 3D printer is not too far off.

 

I may not have been the first person to realize that those toy blocks I grew up with can be useful for some grown-up uses.  However the apparent convergent evolution that has led many makers to reach for Legos® as an early prototyping tool at least makes me feel as though I am in good company.


The Internet of Things

Posted on by Brian Noland


The “internet of things” was first coined in the late 1990’s as a way to describe a future where nearly everything in the world would become affixed with an RFID tag and would be subsequently tracked.  My how the vision has grown!  Now, when people talk about the “internet of things”, they are almost invariably describing the proliferation of internet-connected devices and sensors interconnected with what we currently know as the internet.  It has been projected that by 2020, the number of connected devices with be 50 billion.  This would outstrip the estimated 2020 human population 7 times over.

 

What exactly are all of these internet-connected devices?  Some are old familiar standbys like desktop and laptop computers.  In more recent years, mobile devices like cell phones, tablets, music players, and even e-readers are now enabled with some sort of radio that connects them to the internet.  Think of how many sensors are packed into the average cell phone (GPS, accelerometer, gyroscopes, digital compasses, CMOS imager, sound recorders, light sensors, and moisture sensors…hope you don’t find out about that one the hard way!)  All of those sensors can potentially be points of collected data and stored in the cloud.  They can tell a much richer story about you, your habits, and interactions than your laptop or desktop computers ever could.  With the advent of low-powerBluetooth and the dropping of the cost of the chips that drive them means that lots of things now have sensors that never used to have them.  Even the ubiquitous wristwatch  is being brought into this age.  More and more, the signals from all these sensors will be collected, analyzed, and sometimes acted upon.  Chances are, if you have bought a car within the last year, it has at least one wireless radio someplace.  If not, want a LoJack or OnStar?

 

There is still a huge reservoir of data from “dumb devices” that are equipped with sensors but no connectivity.  Roads, electric meters, cars, vending machines, etc. all have sensors and are often collected onto some kind of memory storage device. In some cases there are private repositories of these kinds of measurements languishing in the databases of companies and governments who don’t know what to do with them.  Liberating the data from these sensors hooked to dumb device needs to be an objective for the world in the coming years.  Potential revenue lies in the data reduction and mining of all of this data for the purpose of creating better business, marketing, and legislative decisions.

 

It is not just your cell phone or car that will be loaded up with sensors, it’s actually going to be you!  There is a large movement in the health and fitness areas to include sensors that you wear.  Some have coined facets of this movement as “the Quantified Self.”   Fitbit  and Nike+ are great examples of early entrants to the space.  Fitness monitors are now becoming more akin to life support monitors used in the early space program.  There is currently a sea change within the diagnostics and health management industries as it relates to wireless sensors.  There are a large number of wireless sensors that can measure everything from brain waves, to EKG, to blood fluid levels, to oxygen saturation, to cuff-less blood pressure, to your baby’s intrauterine movements.  The West Wireless Health Institute  was established just a few years ago in the shadow of UCSD, Scripps, Qualcomm and San Diego Biotech to develop wireless sensors to reduce the cost of medical care.  Dr. Eric Topol, who is on the board of the WWHI, has written a book called “The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care” .  Topol has been a vocal advocate for the adoption of wireless health as a means for the masses to take better care of themselves and not rely so much on doctors.  There is already a big business around collecting that data and trying to help patients to live healthier lives and to prevent costly visits to the doctor’s office or even costlier visits to the Emergency Department.

 

Math is now more important to the future than it has ever been.  Increasingly, there will be need for people trained in advanced mathematics who can reduce all of this data and make actionable sense of it.  New methods of analysis and statistical treatments will need to be created to find those parameters that make a difference by themselves and/or when combined together.  We will need increasing numbers of people who can model and simulate data so that we can start to predict the behaviors of the systems that the sensors read measurements from.  What should you study in college if you are unsure, MATHEMATICS!  When I was growing up, my parents told me to finish my dinner.  Now we should be telling our kids, “finish your math homework…then go do the Google-a-Day puzzle!”  For a time, companies were snatching up programmers that could write good apps.  Watch as the trend migrates to companies seeking to buy up the best analysts and statisticians.  Our educational institutions need to better prepare for this trend.

 

I think that ultimately the idea of the “internet of things” will go away and it will just be the internet again.  We shall know have arrived when we stop talking about the “internet of things” and just expect that newly designed things will be built this way.  Anything less will be considered passé and antiquated.  I eagerly await my Bluetooth-enabled toothbrush…but so does my dentist!

The Era of Big Data

Posted on by Brian Noland

The Era of Big Data

You have probably heard the phrase “the universe is expanding”, well, so is the collective digital data output of humankind.  I recently saw a short video from the Economist called “Drowning in numbers” when it really hit home for me.

The era of big data is upon us.  I am a scientist by training and I tend to gravitate toward what can be measured and analyzed.  The pace of new data being added to the collective data output of planet earth is mind-blowing.  Measured in exabytes, or 1 billion gigabytes, here is what the rate of data accumulation looks like in the decade after 2005:

Most of this information is video and images.

There has also been a paradigm shift in who has access this data.  Previously the providence of large companies, the new era of big data is more democratized with the storage on the cloud and largely available to anyone who has access to the internet.  The number of data points from services like Twitter and Facebook catalog our lives at intervals determined by our interaction with these services.  Layer on top of that a continuous stream of data points from sensors, which will only increase as time goes on.

When everything is digital, everything can be measured.  You might say “what about language, text, photos, videos, and sound?”  All of this information once digitized is quantifiable and thus subject for analysis by someone somewhere in the world.  I recently saw a TED presentation by two researchers who used a subset of the digitized library of some 5 million books in order to quantify mind blowing statistics on how human culture has changed over time:

Google now offers a feature called “goggles” as part of its mobile app for smartphones which allows users to search the web using digital pictures taken on the cell pnone’s camera sensor.  The app combines digital image processing with optical character recognition to search the web for information on the picture you have just taken.  The same Google app as well as the wildly popular “Siri” feature allow users to simply speak to their phones and the internet is searched for relevant information.  If you are in a café and hear a song that you don’t recognize, you can have the Shazam app listen to the song, search its database for a match and give you an instant link on where to buy the song.  It will no doubt be a short time before we can do the same with video.

 

How does our LabStrip platform fit in the era of big data?

At Anywhere Science, we had the thought that chemical test strip results should become part of this expanding aggregate of human knowledge.  We wanted to make our LabStrip system easy to use and very inexpensive to lower the barrier of entry.  Furthermore, we wanted to take advantage of the massive install base of smartphones in the world like the iPhone 4.  Beyond being very powerful pocket computers, these smartphones are also packed with sensors and a mobile link to the internet.  Not least of which is a powerful CMOS camera and flash illumination source, which we augment as the primary data capture mechanism for test strip analysis.  When combined with a cloud server that we call “LabCloud”, your smartphone can become a powerful and deployable tool for making valuable measurements in the field.  All of the data that you collect on the LabStrip system is stored on our server automatically.  The date, time, and location of your measurements become a powerful linkage to a wealth of information that we are only just beginning to understand.  For instance, a pool care professional can now organize all of his data by location and understand differences from one pool to the next of his clients based on things like variable exposure to sunlight or differences in local temperature.  Now imagine this pool care professional comparing his data against thousands of others like him so that his effective data set becomes proportionally larger.  Some effects may only be visible on such a grand scale.  By using LabStrip, this hypothetical pool care professional has taken a step toward understanding his measurements using the “era of big data” approach.

Pool and spa care is just one market where we plan on offering products and services.  Now imagine the myriad of other places where test strips are used every day and imagine all that could be learned by digitizing the results and pushing them to the cloud.  We have plans to develop products for broad-range pH measurement, water quality testing, beer and wine making, food processing, aquaculture and aquarium maintenance, and soil testing.   Now imagine all that would be possible in the world of healthcare and medicine with a similar approach.

We are tremendously excited to bring LabStrip to the market to allow you to add your data to the collective dataset of humankind and to start to understand all that is possible with your measurements in the era of big data.