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The Fizz-Giz: Carbonate on the fly

Posted: 01 May 2010 05:19 PM PDT

You’re a busy man. A man on the go. You have no time for Big Soda telling you what you can and cannot carbonate. As Homey once said, you don’t play that.

So what is a modern carbonation lover to do? You could be tethered to your countertop with the Penguin Soda Maker or you can be free with the Fizz-Giz. This thing is basically a little CO2 gun that uses those tiny CO2 capsules you’ve probably seen in stores (I’ve actually never seen then, but maybe you have.) Anyway, as the above video shows, you put the special cap on a bottle of non-fizzy stuff and shoot gas through. A few squirts and you’re off to the races.

Obviously this is a portable kit. Perhaps you can keep it at work or in your purse for the creation of club soda tableside, thereby avoiding the expense of purchasing soft drinks – or hard – on the go. I’d also like to carbonate stuff like whiskey and gravy, just to see if it’s possible.

The kit costs $29.95 and includes a clever little CO2 delivery system and a few caps fitted with airtight rubber gaskets. You plug the delivery popper into the hole and shoot. While the website lacks a bit of panache, I think the creator’s dedication to the process of creating fizzy drinks makes it worth a second look.

Going It Alone, Part III: Inside the Factory Walls

Posted: 01 May 2010 05:05 PM PDT

Adam Hocherman, 34, is an entrepreneur and founder of the consumer electronics company American Innovative in Boston, MA. Adam founded the company in 2003 with the help of the US Government’s SBA loan program and is currently the 100% owner. He holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA, both from Cornell University. Adam’s writings can be found on his blog at DesignTheatre.net and through his Twitter feed. He welcomes your comments. Read more about sourcing in China here.

Part III of the Going It Alone series will answer the question: What is a factory and how can I tell one from another?  I will answer the question from a consumer electronics perspective and I will assume an audience that has little or no prior knowledge of manufacturing.  The purpose of this article will be to try to introduce the burgeoning entrepreneur to the basic components of electronics manufacturing in China.

I will do this in the context of manufacturing the simple electronic product shown below – a digital kitchen timer that we call the Klip!  This is an item that we sell at The Container Store chain and at gourmet stores across the United States.  I chose this product because, while relatively simple, it still encompasses all of the major facets (noted in the white boxes) of manufacturing a mass-produced electronic item of greater complexity.  I’ll start with a little background, then I’ll give a very basic overview of each manufacturing sub-process and I’ll conclude with a summary that will serve to make your first visit to a third-party manufacturing facility more effective and productive.  Armed with the knowledge from this post you should be able to walk into an Asian plant for the first time and have the basic working knowledge that you need to converse intelligently about the creation of your item.

Although the scope of my company’s products is fairly narrow, my personal background in manufacturing is more broad.  I have visited upwards of 50 plants both here in the United States and in China which include facilities as diverse as the GE Locomotive factory in Erie, PA to the Dunlop Tire plant in Buffalo, NY to the massive VTech Electronics factory in Asia.  I am knowledgeable of lean manufacturing techniques, Poka-Yoke and Kaizan events just to name a few.  I mention these subjects only to give you a taste of how deep the topic of manufacturing can get.  As someone who is planning to contract with a third-party rather than build a factory of your own, these subjects are more academic in nature than you need to know about for now.

Origins of a Factory

The Exterior of a Plant. While Not Gorgeous to Look At, This Is One of AI’s Best Partners

One of things that I like about working with the factories in China is that big or small, I am typically interfacing directly with the owner and director of the facility.  I like these people because they are, like I am, entrepreneurs.  I respect these people because as difficult as it is to start and run a company in a country that encourages and embraces capitalistic activities – try doing it in a country like China.  Many a long car-ride I have spent trading war stories with these factory owners – one entrepreneur to another.  I know that many of you who read my first two posts draw your line between America and China, but I draw it between the entrepreneurs and the corporations.  We live in a global economy.  These individuals work as hard as anyone I’ve ever met, put people to work and make a life for their employees and their families.  To me, that is as honorable a pursuit in China as it is in this country.  More on this topic at a later date – for purposes of this article I plan to focus on the mechanics and leave further discussion of the culture for another post.

Assembly
Take a moment to put modern-day electronics in perspective.  If you’re under 20 years old, you may feel like inexpensive electronic gadgetry has always been as ubiquitous as it is today.  However, I’m 34 and I still remember the mechanical alarm clock that my parents had which displayed digital-like numerals on a series of “leaves” which “flipped” by gravity, as a mechanical gear-train churned away to keep the time.  This product predated the advent of the inexpensive, mass-produced integrated circuit (IC) and related display technologies (7-segment LEDs).
Of the factories that American Innovative works with, the oldest ones are a mere 25-30 years old and the youngest one is no older than American Innovative itself – about 7.
Admittedly, the young factory is not as sophisticated as the older factories but, much like the older factories, it began primarily as an assembly house.  Over time this factory has (and will continue) to acquire machines and technology that will allow them to bring more and more functions in-house, that are currently performed outside.  Perhaps other functions will never be brought in-house.  While we tend to view in-house injection molding (see below) as a sign of a more mature facility, we work with at least one very high-quality facility that continues to outsource this, presumably by design.


Assembly Line – Notice the instructions behind each worker which outline the detail of that step.

Assembly is what most of you probably think of as the heart of the factory, and it is.  All related components have either been acquired from outside sources or manufactured elsewhere in the facility and they come together in long rows of moving conveyor belts and – yes – young, predominantly female, wage-workers which perform a solitary function on the line (more on who these people are in a future post).

The lines are setup such that each worker performs a very specific task, which is carefully planned and designed in advance.  The details of that tasks are outlined on a sheet of paper which hangs alongside the station.  More recently I’ve seen a more sophisticated setup in which flat screen monitors replace the papers that you observe in the photo here.

A single assembly line step might be to use an electric, torque-limiting screwdriver to secure a PCB (Printed Circuit Board) to a plastic, injection molded base.  Another worker might then solder two wire leads to a speaker and a third might be an in-line QC (Quality Control) person which uses a harness to connect power to the partially-built product and test the speaker.

SMT PCB Manufacture
So where does said PCB come from?  Printed Circuit Boards are obviously the lifeblood of any electronic product and, not surprisingly, the technology used to create them has come a long, long way.  There are two common types of PCB – through-hole and SMT.  If you’ve ever assembled a circuit board from a kit using a soldering iron then you’re familiar with through-hole technology.  Wire leads from individual components are hand-fed into the PCB (etched previously).  The leads are then soldered and snipped.  Some components are still done in exactly this manner today but more recently newer, less manual-intensive, technology has replaced this process.  SMT stands for Surface-Mount Technology.

American Innovative Klip! Timer PCB

Look closely at the photo above.  This is the PCB that is the core of Americ
an Innovative’s Klip! kitchen timer.  The board above is an example of an SMT PCB.  On the far right you see a shiny metal cylinder which contains the quartz crystal responsible for running the clock.  This is the lone through-hole component on this board.  Next to that you can see two white wire leads which run to the speaker.  There are a couple of wire jumpers and the battery contacts on the left but other than that the remaining components are surface-mount technology.  The small, rectangular boxes are various resistors, transistors or diodes which comprise the circuit.


SMT Machine – Notice that many small PCBs are being assembled all at once. They are later separated.

These special SMT components are placed on the PCB using a machine which literally grabs the components one at a time and places them on the board using a guided positioning system or in some older machines I’ve seen (like the one picture at right) by moving the PCB itself around, with the feed mechanism stationary.  As an aside, I’ve even been to a factory that makes these machines – there happens to be one in upstate New York.  If you ever wanted to know what the machine is that makes the machines that make the machines?  Well … it’s us.

There are countless videos on YouTube that will allow you to see an SMT machine in action.  Here’s one that I located randomly.  Next the boards are run through a machine called a wave solderer that essentially solders every lead all at once, thereby replacing the extensive manual labor that used to go into the creation of a similar board made using through-hole technology.  The SMT boards are smaller and more reliable.

IC Bonding
IC Bonding Machine in Action – The Finished Item Will Be a Walkie-Talkie

Looking at the photo of the PCB again, you’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned anything about what that ubiquitous little black blob is.  That is a blob of epoxy.  Beneath the epoxy is the board’s MCU (Micro Controller Unit).  The MCU is “stitched” to the board in a process that looks not unlike sewing with a sewing machine.  A worker aligns the IC bonding machine with the receiving area of the PCB using a high-power digital magnifier and then the rest of the process is completely automated.  Finally a blob of epoxy covers the delicate MCU pins to prevent damage and deterioration.

Look for the second half of Adam Hocherman’s Going it Alone, Part III tomorrow.

iPad 3G gets torn down

Posted: 01 May 2010 02:44 PM PDT


Desperate to see what’s under the smooth exterior of your new iPad 3G but don’t want to crack it open and void the warranty? Fear not, friend. iFixit has done the dirty work (very cleanly, I might add) and taken the iPod touch jumbo edition to pieces. There aren’t a lot of surprises, but hey, it’s Saturday afternoon and you want to see the guts of an expensive gadget. Get another cup of coffee.

The internals really are very similar to the vanilla iPad’s — the main difference is the communications board, sporting all the fun 3G elements and the A-GPS module. The chips and parts are listed in the teardown if you’re thinking of tinkering. Personally, I wonder whether a modified Wi-Fi antenna might be a worthwhile modification.

And don’t forget that iFixit now has a whole other reason for being. Contribute if you can.

AT&T On The iPad 3G Video Restrictions: “That’s something you need to ask Apple”

Posted: 01 May 2010 09:41 AM PDT

Today in the U.S. people are getting their hands on the 3G version of the iPad for the first time. The hardware is supposed to be exactly the same as the WiFi-only version except, of course, it has a cell chip in it to receive data over AT&T's 3G network when you're not connected to WiFi. Since the hardware is basically the same, all the apps should function the same, right? Wrong. Reports are already coming in that some of the most popular iPad apps -- the ones that stream video -- are being restricted on the new iPad 3G. Specifically, the YouTube app scales videos down to a "dramatically lower resolution over the cellular data connection," according to iLounge. Worse, the ABC Player apparently won't work at all unless you connect to a WiFi network, as a pop-up message informs the user. But apparently iTunes Store streaming video previews are working just fine in full resolution. No word on the Netflix app just yet.


Review: Panasonic Lumix DMC-G10 Digital Camera

Posted: 01 May 2010 06:20 AM PDT

What is this thing?
The rise of micro four-thirds camera is probably biggest potential change in popular cameras since the rise of the point and shoot. Micro four thirds “system” cameras offer the best of both worlds – removable lenses for folks who like to play with focal lengths and primes and a simple interface and low price for entry level users.

The Lumix DMC-G10 is Panasonic’s latest addition to its G family of m4/3 cameras. It is, in short, Panasonic’s attempt at creating a strong competitor to Canon and Nikon’s entry-level DSLR line-up and at the same time attack the entry-level consumer who may be in the market for an ultrazoom point and shoot or, barring that, a standard pocket camera.

Features:

  • 12-megapixel sensor
  • 720p video recording
  • ISO 100-6400 range/li>
  • 14-42mm kit lens
  • $599

Pros:

  • Light and small
  • Excellent photo quality
  • Built-in flash

Cons:

  • Low resolution screen and digital viewfinder
  • Some odd interface choices

The Camera
The G10 looks like a standard DSLR. The lenses, while considerably smaller, can fall into the hefty range, especially when you look at the 45-200mm. However, the camera body is only 12 ounces and weighs in at 20 ounces with the kit lens included. This alone would make it a good, portable camera. However, the G10 is sized almost like a DSLR, so you lose much of the portability because of the large hand grip and body.

The camera has a 3-inch LCD on the pack and a “live” view finder which is actually a tiny LCD that mirrors the 12.1 megapixel Live MOS Sensor output. Both the LCD screen and viewfinder display all major camera readouts and on-screen prompts allow you to modify settings on the fly.

The camera has standard Program, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, and Manual Modes as well as portrait, landscape, action, macro, backlit, and scene mode. Scene modes include the old standbys like Night Portrait as well as Sunset, Party, Baby (two settings!), and Pet. It has 100-6400 ISO equivalency and a small pop-up flash.

The camera also takes 720p video and can autofocus during filming, allowing you to perform a few fun camera tricks while shooting.

The kit lens is a VARIO 14-42mm with image stabilization. It’s a nice, close shot and is a bit slower than I’d like in low light. There is also a hot-shoe for optional external flash.

In short, you’re getting the equivalent of a mini-DSLR: loads of features in a package considerably smaller than even most ultrazoon fans are used to.

The Quality
So how does it shoot? Since I’m not a prosumer by any means, I did enjoy the auto mode – essentially an automatic mode that takes most of the guesswork out of the shoots. However, I did feel that the camera is overly complex, especially for a new user. The myriad modes and functions do not appear to be well laid out and selecting a Scene mode – one of the popular crutches for beginning photographers – doesn’t bring up a Scene menu immediately. You instead need to hit the iA button to bring up the menu and even then it is unclear when this menu will appear. It took a few tries to get it to pop up.

As for the photos, I was pleased with the bit of shooting I did with this camera. It’s an impressive piece of equipment and with the right glass it takes nice shots.

The Good
The G10 takes great shots and video. I used it in multiple lighting situations over the past week and came away slightly annoyed by some blurring in the wrong light but most of my shots came out crisp and clear. At $599 with lens you’ll be hard-pressed to find a similarly outfitted camera with a removable lens.

There are some sample photos in sunlight there as well as a shot inside a dimly lit cigar bar. The video recording is also quite nice with good focus throughout. I’m going to put up some sample video shortly.

The Bad
The G10 is a bit big. If this is supposed to be a more portable camera for the photog on the go, the lens and body size definitely doesn’t help. I much prefer the size of the Olympus E-PL1 I reviewed, at least in terms of portability. You are just a hair smaller than a DSLR with this camera, and that could put some people off.

Whereas the E-PL1 feels like a good “second” camera, Panasonic is clearly aiming this one as a camera made to pre-empt the purchase of a DSLR. While this is a noble goal, I wonder how many experienced shooters will want another fairly lumpen camera in their mix.

Bottom Line
As a gadget reviewer people ask me all the time what kind of camera they should get. Barring obvious recommendations for folks who are not very tech savvy and just want something for the pocket or purse, I always recommend an entry-level DSLR like the Canon Rebel. I am slowly changing that recommendation to something in the m4/3s family. Although I personally prefer the size of the E-PL1, I would consider this a worthy adversary in the nascent micro 4/3s line-up.

Product Page

Rolex Deep Sea Special: Water resistant to 35,840 feet

Posted: 01 May 2010 05:30 AM PDT

Sure, you think you're pretty special with your Timex that's water resistant to 100 meters. Maybe you even have a divers watch, that'll go down to 300 meters. They don't have anything on this Rolex, it's been down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and came back alive.


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