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Personal

Monoprice Mini Delta 3D Printer

The world of low-price 3D printing has been upended by Monoprice over the last several months. They’ve launched a handful of very inexpensive but well-reviewed printers at price points that basically no other manufacturer can touch.

Their latest printer, the Monoprice Mini Delta was launched earlier this year on Indiegogo, and I just received one of them. It’s a very small delta style 3D printer that’s rated to handle ABS and PLA. It has a heated bed, and more importantly, an auto-leveling feature, even if the build volume is only 120mm x 120mm (Delta printers have circular beds, which makes the bed size a diameter rather than an X/Y plane measurement). It even has wifi built in, so that prints can be sent wirelessly.

Did I mention that the printer is rumored to cost only $149? Fully assembled, ready to go out of the box.  They haven’t publicly announced retail pricing yet, but it looks like they are aiming at a $149 as the price, which will make this an amazing deal.

Even $149 is still a fair amount of money for many people, but relative to other 3D printers it is an amazing entry-level price.  For that price, you don’t get the long-term reliability of something like a Lulzbot Mini…the Monoprice Mini Delta is all metal, but is clearly not as well-built as more expensive printers. The tech support alone is going to be far, far less competent that companies that specialize in 3D printing. It’s louder, it rattles a bit, the fit and finish isn’t perfect. But in my testing, the quality of the prints it is putting out for me is much higher than one might expect given the price point.

I’ve printed a couple of Benchys at different orientations, and they have all been well within my expectations for accuracy.

All in all, this is a heck of a printer for the price. The reports online are that Monoprice is having a few issues with first-round production errors…bad control boards mostly. Those are being fixed with new machines immediately, though, so it looks like they are handling the launch and initial support problems fairly well.

I’m not yet certain if I’d recommend the Monoprice Delta Mini to libraries, as I haven’t had time to put hours and hour of printing on the thing to test its reliability. Given the overall build quality, I’m betting that this printer will need a bit of attention to keep running smoothly, which is something that libraries often can’t take the time to do. For libraries, I still recommend going with proven workhorses like the Lulzbot Mini as an entry level printer, or the Taz 6 as a high-end production machine. Even though the Delta Mini is almost 1/10th of the price of the Lulzbot Mini, I’m not convinced it’ll last 10 times as long, or print reliably 10 times as often.

What I would do is recommend the Delta Mini to librarians who are interested in playing around with the technology without a huge investment. For $150, you can have your own 3D printer to play with sitting on your desk at home….one that takes up about as much space as a large houseplant. This is the perfect sort of printer for individuals that just want to play around with printing things for the house, or their kids.

It has definitely made me set up and take notice of what Monoprice is doing in this space. I expect we’ll keep hearing from them over the next year or so with bargain-basement prices on interesting hardware. I’ll keep my eyes out.

Categories
FutureTech Internet of Things Release_Candidate

Google and Levi’s connected smart jacket 

The connected denim smart jacket made in partnership between Levi’s and Google’s ATAP division now has a price tag, but its release date has been pushed from this spring to the fall. The jacket, which will cost around $350 when it goes on sale, is the first commercial product containing ATAP’s Project Jacquard technology, which uses conductive fabric to turn a standard article of clothing into a connected device of sorts that can send instructions to your smartphone, like pausing or skipping a song that’s playing by double tapping your wrist.

Source: Google and Levi’s connected smart jacket will come out this fall and cost around $350 – The Verge

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FutureTech Release_Candidate Security

High-end poker cheating devices

This is a crazy story about custom hardware designed to allow for card game cheating, including not only poker but nearly any other card game. Custom hardware made to look like a cell phone plus IR marked cards equals total knowledge about what’s happening on the table.

Upon ordering the poker cheating device I kinda expected, based on the screenshots I had seen early on, to get a dedicated piece of hardware that kinda looked like a fake phone. However, to my surprise, the device, showcased in the picture above, far exceeded my expectations by being a fully functional phone with extra hardware dedicated to cheating. Also to my surprise, the device not only allows to cheat at Poker but to cheat at almost any kind of card games you can think of.

Source: Full(er) House: Exposing high-end poker cheating devices

Categories
FutureTech Open Hardware Release_Candidate

Zombie Moore’s Law shows hardware is eating software

This is a fantastic article that illustrates one reason I’ve been so fascinated by hardware over the last few years.

The cheap and easy gains of the last fifty years of Moore’s Law gave birth to a global technology industry. The next little while – somewhere between twenty and fifty years out – will be dominated by a transition from software into hardware, a confusion of the two so complete it will literally become impossible to know where the boundary between the two lies.

Source: Zombie Moore’s Law shows hardware is eating software • The Register

Categories
Gadgets Maker Technology

Sexism, meeting dynamics, attention analysis: who talks during meetings

Yesterday, Andromeda Yelton posted this excellent blog entry, Be Bold, Be Humble: Wikipedia, libraries, and who spoke. It’s about the well-known social sexism dynamic of meetings, where in a meeting that has both women and men, men speak more frequently, use fewer self-undercutting remarks (“I’m not sure….” or “Just…” or “Well, maybe…”), and interrupt others speech at a much higher rate than women in the same meeting.

The post got passed around the social nets (as it should, it’s wonderfully written and you should go read it now) and one of the results was this great exchange:

 

Which prompted me to reply:

I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, which basically means that it needs to show up here on the blog. I thought all night about how to architect something like that in hardware/software as a stand alone unit. There is always Are Men Talking Too Much?, which Andromeda linked to in her essay, but it has the downside of requiring someone to manually press the buttons in order to track the meeting.

I’ve been basically obsessing over attention metrics for the last couple of years as a part of bringing Measure the Future to life. The entire point of Measure the Future is to collect and analyze information about the environment that is currently difficult to capture…movement of patrons in space. The concept of capturing and analyzing speakers during a meeting isn’t far off, just with audio instead of video signal. How could we built a thing that would sit on a table in a meeting, listen and count men’s vs women’s speaking, including interruptions, and track and graph/visualize the meeting for analysis?

Here’s how I’d architect such a thing, if I were going to build it. Which I’m not right now, because Measure the Future is eating every second that I have, but…if I were to start tinkering on this after MtF gives me some breathing room, here’s how I might go about it.

We are at the point in the progress of Moore’s Law that even the cheapest possible microcomputer can handle audio analysis without much difficulty. The Raspberry Pi 3 is my latest object of obsession…the built-in wifi and BTLE changes the game when it comes to hardware implementations of tools. It’s fast, easy to work with, runs a variety of linux installs, and can support both GPIO or USB sensors. After that, it would just be selecting a good omnidirectional microphone to ensure even coverage of vocal capture.

I’d start with that for hardware, and then take a look at the variety of open source audio analysis tools out there. There’s a ton of open source code that’s available for speech recognition, because audio interfaces are the new hotness, but that’s actually overcomplicated for what we would need.

What we would want is something more akin to voice analysis software rather than recognition…we don’t care what words are being said, specifically, we just care about recognizing male vs female voices. This is difficult and has many complicating factors…it would be nearly impossible to get to 100% success rate in identification, as the complicating factors are many (multiple voices, echo in meeting rooms, etc). But there is work being done in this area: the voice-gender project on Github has a pre-trained software that appears to be exactly the sort of thing we’d need. Some good discussion about difficulty and strategies here as well.

If we weren’t concerned about absolute measures and instead were comfortable with generalized averages and rounding errors, we could probably get away with this suggestion, which involves fairly simply frequency averaging. These suggestions are from a few years ago, which means that the hardware power available to throw at the problem is 8x or better what it was at that point.

And if we have network connectivity, we could even harness the power of machine learning at scale and push audio to something like the Microsoft Speaker Recognition API, which has the ability to do much of what we’d ask. Even Google’s TensorFlow and Parsey McParseface might be tools to look at for this.

Given the state of cloud architectures, it may even be possible to build our gender meeting speech analysis engine entirely web-based, using Chrome as the user interface. The browser can do streaming audio to the cloud, where it would be analyzed and then returned for visualization. I have a particular bias towards instantiating things in hardware that can be used without connectivity, but in this case, going purely cloud architecture might be equally useful.

Besides gender, the other aspect that I had considered analyzing was interruptions, which I think could be roughly modeled by analyzing overlap of voices and ordering of speech actors. You could mark an “interruption event” by the lack of time between speakers, or actual overlap of voices, and you could determine the actor/interrupter by ordering of voices.

Once you have your audio analysis, visualizing it on the web would be straightforward. There are javascript libraries that do great things with charts like Chart.js or Canvas, or if working in the cloud you could use Google Chart Tools.

If any enterprising developer wants to work on something like this, I’d love to help manage the project. I think it could be a fun hackathon project, especially if going the cloud route. All it needs is a great name, which I’m not clever enough to think of right now. Taking suggestions over on Twitter @griffey.

Categories
Measure the Future Personal

Measure the Future

Measure the Future logo

I am beyond thrilled to announce that my project Make the Things that Measure the Future: Open Hardware & Libraries has been awarded one of the eight John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge grants. The winners of these grants seek to answer the question “How might we leverage libraries as a platform to build more knowledgable communities?”

What are we going to be doing? Here’s a quick video that explains the project:

As a result of this, I give you the Measure the Future Project.  That’s the website where we will be reporting on our progress, linking out to the code and hardware that we make, and generally being as transparent as possible as we move towards making the things that measure the future. It also links out to our social media accounts and other places of interest where we’ll be talking about what we’re doing.

This means that I will be working for the next 18 months on a project that I first imagined over 2 years ago, a project that I think has the potential to have incredible impact on how libraries view data about their buildings and what happens inside them. As we move through the next decade, I feel strongly that libraries of all types are going to need to measure and report new and different metrics in order to demonstrate to their funders that they are still vibrant parts of their communities. I’m hoping that I can help define those metrics by producing the hardware and software that collects, measures, and reports them.

I’m honored and privileged to have this opportunity to work to make libraries everywhere better. I would like to thank everyone that helped Measure the Future to this point, but especially my team members Jenica Rogers, Gretchen Caserotti, and Jeff Branson, all of whom were willing to agree to help support this crazy idea I had even before it was fully formed.

At 1pm today there will be an announcement at the ALA Midwinter conference in Chicago, where the winners will have a chance to celebrate a little and explain to the world what they will be doing to make libraries better and communities more engaged. If want to see some of the most interesting work that will be done in libraries over the next few years, I recommend coming by and seeing what the other groups are up to.

Congratulations to all of the winners. Let’s go make libraries amazing. Let’s go make our communities amazing.

If you want to help us Measure the Future, let me know.