Update on the TripleWide Extender X and Open Source Pricing

One of the most fundamental rules of business I've ever heard is that products need to be priced independent of cost. This is also cited as the most common rookie mistake, the idea of costing out a product and slapping a fixed margin on top.

"You've gotta charge what the market will pay, otherwise, you're leaving money on the table!"
"If you just put a margin on top of cost, then the price wars will begin, and you're just going to keep discounting and discounting until there's no margin left"

The Open Source Hardware Bank has gone against that rule entirely. The price was deliberately assigned as a roughly 15% margin over cost, which was estimated and made apparent upfront. But then again, the goal wasn't to "maximize profits (and take over the world)". It was simply to make a piece of hardware accessible and feasible to build, and to offer a modest reward for everyone who helped make it possible. So it may violate the rules of conventional business, but this paradigm of "Open Source Pricing" works for the sake of turning an idea into reality.

Then what happens when the cost estimates were a little too high to start off? Business rules would say you keep the excess margin, but following the 15% over cost model, the price would be reduced accordingly. So as it turns out, building the TripleWide Extender X was much cheaper than expected (in part because of similarities in production to the DoubleWide, and taking the final assembly in-house to get them out faster). With an original anticipated cost of 31.53, the price was 36.26. And so the "Buy 1, Build 1" cost was 67.79, and folks who helped fund it would have received one TripleWide and a check for 36.26 in return.

As it turned out, the TripleWide X, Illuminato compatible (double rows of headers) cost 24.87 to build, keeping a constant 15% margin would result in a price of 29.26. The real question is then, what happens to the people who have funded one at 31.53, expecting their 15% return after it sold? Well, the difference in cost still goes back to them.

To recap, Buy 1, Build 1 was originally:

36.26 to buy 1
+ 31.53 to build 1

for a total of 67.79.

As it turned out, the cost was lower. So now:

29.26 to buy 1
+ 24.87 to build 1

for a total of 54.13.

Hence, everyone who bought 1, built 1 will get:

1 TripleWide X + 7 (the difference in final price that they overpaid)
+ 29.26 (the final price of the board sold) + 6.65 (the amount they overpaid in cost)

All told, they'll get a check for 42.91 rather than just 36.26, since the savings are passed along. The product was made possible for cheaper than expected, and everyone saves money. It's the business of Open Source Pricing :-)

ButtonShield... HOW TO?

A lot of people who just got their ButtonShields were asking about how they could get up and running, so I decided to put together a short summary sheet for the ButtonShield.

It goes over all the different parts of the ButtonShield, from the arduino communication libraries to how each of the buttons are mapped.
I've put it up on the Liquidware site over here. Let me know if there's anything else I should add, or cool things to do with it!

CC Processing and More

A sneak peak at the new liquidware.com cart system shows how it's much easier to checkout using just your credit card. This is a huge improvement over the paypal account system.



Google has been pushing this faster web thing lately:
http://code.google.com/speed/. Matt B used some cool techniques like
multiple domains for parallel downloads, aggressive HTTP caching, and
better image compression to make Liquidware.com over 2x as fast for some users. Look at these neat graphs of the http traffic:


Liquidware.com is way bigger than a year ago, it's nice to get it back
to being speedy!

Hacking the TouchShield Slide: Undocumented Easter Egg

Why is open source cool? I got an email from Raj, who’s been using the TouchShield for a while, saying “I noticed there’s an extra RGB LED that I don’t think is supposed to be there.”

To which I replied, “PSYCH! Actually, it’s supposed to be there, and you’re the first person to discover that easter egg!” There are other easter eggs on the TouchShield Slide, but this is the first one that anyone’s found.

Ok, well then I guess it’s time to post some code…here's how to hack it:

void setup()
{

/* Setup pin direction */
SETBIT(DDRD, PD4);//set the red led data direction to output
SETBIT(DDRD, PD5);//set the green led data direction to output
SETBIT(DDRD, PD6);//set the blue led data direction to output

/* Turn on all LEDs */
CLRBIT(PORTD, PD4);//turn on the red led
CLRBIT(PORTD, PD5);//turn on the green led
CLRBIT(PORTD, PD6);//turn on the blue led

}

void loop()
{

/* Turn on all LEDs */

CLRBIT(PORTD, PD4);//turn on the red led
CLRBIT(PORTD, PD5);//turn on the green led
CLRBIT(PORTD, PD6);//turn on the blue led
delay(1000);//wait for 1 second

/* Turn off LEDs */
SETBIT(PORTD, PD4);//turn off the red led
SETBIT(PORTD, PD5);//turn off the green led
SETBIT(PORTD, PD6);//turn off the blue led
delay(1000);//wait for 1 second

/* Blink the RED LED */
CLRBIT(PORTD, PD4);//turn on the red led
delay(1000);//wait for 1 second
SETBIT(PORTD, PD4);//turn off the red led
delay(1000);//wait for 1 second

/* Blink the GREEN LED */
CLRBIT(PORTD, PD5);//turn on the green led
delay(1000);//wait for 1 second
SETBIT(PORTD, PD5);//turn off the green led
delay(1000);//wait for 1 second

/* Blink the BLUE LED */
CLRBIT(PORTD, PD6);//turn on the blue led
delay(1000);//wait for 1 second
SETBIT(PORTD, PD6);//turn off the blue led
delay(1000);//wait for 1 second

Unbeknownst to everyone who’s ever bought a TouchShield slide, there’s actually a multi-color RGB LED backlight on the reverse side of the board. This lets someone set “mood lighting” for a gadget – eat that, iPod…

This Book Sounds Like Me!

Ever wake up one day, and realize that your entire life has been predicted, if not played out, in entirety, in a book? I think that just happened to me...

I just read this little post on Boing Boing today, and my jaw literally dropped. Actually, Justin's jaw dropped too because this is not only creepy, it's kind of cool at the same time. Cory Doctorow talks about Makers, his next novel, which began as an online serial a few years ago, called Themepunks:

"Makers tells the story of a group of hardware hackers who fall in with microfinancing venture capitalists and reinvent the American economy after a total economic collapse, and who find themselves swimming with sharks, fighting with gangsters, and leading a band of global techno-revolutionaries."

Going down the list...

• Hardware Hacker - check, check, check
  
• Microfinance - check
  
• Economic Collapse - check
  
• Fighting with Gangsters - sort of :-)
  
• Global Techno Revolutionaries - check, check, and check
• PowerPoint - check
  
• Blue Blazer - check (I almost always wear one, just because)

I read the first 2 chapters from the Themepunk story web site, and a few things stuck out that totally rang a bell:

• The fact that IBM doesn't even make their own computers anymore. Yeah, what the hell?
• "Capitalism is eating itself." What a great phrase! According to some economists and job surveys, the best and brightest want to become bankers, not engineers - booooo....
  

There are a couple of things in the writing that don't completely work, but that's ok:

• There's no CEO, because that's too corporate sounding, and plus everyone knows that centralized hierarchical organization models are so 1980's paradigm (sorry, Henry Mintzberg)
  
• No khaki's - they get solder flux stains too easily ... everyone knows jeans are way better :-)
  

So I guess I don't really have any other choice than to say, ... I will buy this book, and definitely look forward to reading every page. I just hope it ends up well!

And if you're reading this, Cory Doctorow, I would absolutely LOVE to sell your book on the Liquidware shop website....

Viva la hardware hacking microfinance economic rebuilding techno revolutionaries!

Arduino IDE Meets Ruby

Scripting languages have evolved a lot in the recent years. Ruby in particular, has had such a significant impact, that there are entire teams dedicated to maintaining it's visual identity across the web.


Designed by Tom Schaub is a widely used logo for the ruby programming language.

Sporting some flashy ruby icons, is the Scripting tab in the Arduino IDE. Upon startup, a listing of your ruby script files is generated from your Sketchbook directory.


Don't look, yet!

Of course there's no scripts in there, you need to crack open your ruby reference and create some. Once you do, you'll see how easy it is to automate repetitive tasks.

Hello_Arduino_World.rb code listing:

puts("Hello Arduino World")

Click RUN and you will get the standard output right to the console:


File I/O
How about writing to a file from a ruby script? Well that's easy:

myFile  = File.new("test.txt","w")

myFile.puts("Writing a line to a text file.")
myFile.puts("And Another.")

myFile.close()

Ruby scripting support is built into the Antipasto Arduino IDE in versions 0.8.11 or greater.



Enjoy!

How to use the Lithium BackPack

This is my first time ever trying to use Instructables, so here goes:


Powering the Arduino Mega with a Lithium Battery - More DIY How To Projects


And just in case, here's a youtube video showing off the first board I made:



The Mega Lithium BackPack is a lithium ion rechargeable battery pack for the Arduino Mega...

Thanks!

OSHW Bank in a slide presentation!

I don't know who this guy is, but it makes me quite thrilled to see he's talking about the slide I wrote on the Open Source Hardware Bank (p.s. if you email me, I'd be more than happy to give you the higher quality version, or the original!).

As it just so happens, the Mega Lithium Backpack was 100% funded by the OSHW Bank, even though it didn't have a full "queue" like some of the other projects, it just got out-right funded by one of the guys Justin and I met a few months ago :-) Thanks!

Introducing the Mega BackPack, a battery for the Arduino Mega

The past week I've started to use Twitter. Ironically, the reason is because this venture startup guy who reminds me a lot like a snake oil salesman, called me up and wanted to buy the liquidware.com domain name (I think he ended up getting liquidwarelabs.com instead, so more power to him). I kept feeling the whole time he talked to me that he was trying to sell me steak knives or life insurance. Ugh. But, he did say I was missing out for not using Twitter... so I tried tonight to "tweet" my play by play of making and posting the Mega Lithium Backpacks. Twitter seems like more of a pain than it's worth...


This is the new version of the Mega Lithium BackPack, a specially designed version of the Lithium BackPack Chris, Mike, and I built for the new Arduino Mega. Over the past few weeks, I got a lot of emails about folks who really badly wanted a backpack for the Mega, so I took a vacation day and built one. (ps thanks to pete, who helped proofread the schematic and suggested the new arrangement of power rails, and chris who looked over my shoulder the whole time).

The Mega Lithium BackPack is an Open Source Hardware battery shield for the Arduino Mega that snaps to the back of the board, and provides around 15-27 hours of battery power to circuits built with the Arduino Mega (depending on the circuit). It gives a 3.3 volt, 5 volt, ground, and battery capacity testing signal that can be plugged into the Analog input port to test how much battery power is left.


Here's a picture of the first official Mega BackPack ever built (I lost my other camera, so I had to take this picture with my iPhone, which is old generation, and I hate it because it gets more and more outdated every other month, and I wish I could just swap out the camera in it):





Just like the original Arduino's, the Arduino Mega has these neat little screw holes in strategically placed locations throughout the board, that make for great places to put small stand-offs, that allow the Backpack to hang on to the backside of the Arduino without moving around:

Here's a shot that I took on a piece of white foam board, showing how the Mega Backpack is the same size and shape as the Arduino MEGA, and showing it side by side with the original Arduino:

For some reason, the flash on Matt's camera that I borrow has been acting up, so I had to edit this picture manually to remove the gray in the background. That took a while... I wonder if there's a professional tool for picture cleanup? I still spend way too much time on this part:
One of the nice things about being small and making Open Source Hardware is that I've gotten to meet a lot of interesting guys like pete (thanks!) who have lots of engineering experience. Pete offered to proofread the entire schematic before I built he PCB's, and that resulted in the whole thing working in only 1 revision! Thanks! It was also Pete's idea to string together the power and ground lines to make them visibly clear that they all do the same thing. Incidentally, the top rail is the "status" wire, which can be tested with the Arduino's analog input to see how much charge the battery has left, and there's a 5 volt and 3.3 volt line, just like the original Lithium Backpack:



I just uploaded a bunch of the other pictures I took over at Flickr, and I listed some for sale by themselves, or in starter packs with Arduino mega's.

As long as I'm building them myself (and with Justin and Mike's help, and anyone else who might want to make the trip down to Connecticut, the Mega backpack's will be the same price as the original Lithium Backpack, until I get tired of soldering them myself - ha)

Using the TripleWide X to Make an Open Source PSP

...that Plays Ping Pong. Sony's got nothing on the Arduino... :-)

Update: A lot of folks have emailed me about posting a kit to build the Open Source PSP, so I've added it to the Liquidware site as the "Open PSP Kit". Thanks!

Introducing the TripleWide ExtenderShield X (and Pascal's Triangle)

The Open Source TripleWide is funded by the Open Source Hardware bank (thanks!) just came in the mail, and Mike and I spent past week building up a few of them. The TripleWide is like the what yuo'd get as the result of applying the binomial theorem and Newton's expansion, represented in Pascal's triangle... in other words, first there was a protoShield, then a bunch of different types of protoshields, then a DoubleWide ExtenderShield, and then a TripleWide ExtenderShield.

Assuming this:

Therefore this:

But since Pascal's triangle has two 3's in the third row, naturally that means there had to be two different versions of the TripleWide: one with single inline headers to fit the Arduino, and one with double inline headers for the Illuminato ... hence the "X" name:

Incidentally, I think it's safe to say the next row (called the 4th row because the top 1 is the 0'th row) of Pascal's triangle is a bit intimidating... I can't imagine what a QuadWide or SextupleWide ExtenderShield would look like - actually I can, and it's not pretty, and certainly not small.

Anyway, the whole point of the TripleWide is to allow someone to put up to 3 shields on an Arduino Mega or Arduino Duemilanove or Diecimila. That initially sounds weird, but now that there are more and more shields out there, it's starting to make sense. For instance...


The Open Source Ping-Pong-Playing "PSP"

Here are some pictures of the TripleWide ExtenderShield placed on top of an Arduino, with a TouchShield, and 2 InputShields (one set to mode A, and the other set to mode B):

And here's a video that Mike took of him and Chris playing the ping pong game:



The source code for everything is over at the "App Store"... and I just put the TripleWide up on the liquidware shop...

Tilt-based accelerometer-powered Space Invaders

Mike just sent me an email with the urgent flag set with a link to ArduinoWill's video... what I'm doing still up at 2 am on a Sunday is anyone's guess... but this was definitely worth it...

"This clone of the classic Space Invaders game runs on the Arduino Duemillinove with the Liquidware TouchShield Slide and the Sparkfun 3 Axis Accelerometer. Using the accelerometer as a tilt sensor to control the movement of your defender and tapping the screen (running my 1.4 firmware) to fire."



Ha ha - what's up with shooting your own bunker... boo... what's the cheat code for regeneration? :-) The coolest part to me is the part where depending on how far accelerometer is tilted, the speed of the slide either goes faster or slower.

The souce code is uploaded over at the "App Store" (which isn't really a store because everything is Open Source and free...)... and to top it all off, nice icon :) That's pretty cool...

Designing the Illuminato, Round 3

With two projects (the ButtonShield and the Illuminato, Round 2) now out the door, I figured it was time to get the ball rolling on a few others OSHW Bank projects. Justin S, Andrew, Jeff, and a few other folks have been working on shields of their own, and I've already gotten quite a few questions and suggestions about Illuminato, Round 3.

A USB-mini connection and standoff holes (thanks Robb!) are a couple thoughts that floated to the top. What do you think? Feel free to get a hold of me directly at jhuynh at gmail. I guess this is one makeshift way of doing collaborative, open source hardware design, without having to ship Gerber files back and forth :)

Then in about a week or so, I'll post up a revised list of features going into the next Illuminato here and over on the Illuminato page from the shop, based on what everyone seems to be looking for, and open up the OSHW Bank queue for Round 3!