Silence for a month, then two updates in the same day?  Mike, what were you thinking???

Here's the 50,000ft view of the Beta design, and some of the reasons behind it.

Tim and I are very differant sizes and shapes, just like the rest of humanity.  My shape began very much stick-like and now is moving for more into the pear-shape than I'm happy with, and that got me thinking.  What would I do if either a)my waist keeps on expanding or b)I get my lazy gut in shape again?  With our current design I would need to build an entirely new set of hardware to accomodate me.  I'm WAY too cheap to do that.

Tim (in typical fashion) applied some common sense to the problem.

"Make the hardware reconfigurable." he says.

"How?" I ask.

Then he sighs and patiently points out where I'm overthinking the problem.  (Oh no!  Now they know our design process!  I've said too much!)

So it comes to this: The expensive potion of the belt is a 'buy once' item, and through the power and glory of modular design, the less expensive portion is removable, reconfigurable and replaceable with no tools beyond a simple screwdriver (and that won't even be necessary in the future).  No technical knowledge is required, and everything is marked.  No fiddling with wires, or any complicated proceedures.

I'll see if I can do a model of the system in something like sketchup and post it, or at least scan my crude drawings.  It's going to be chock-full of awsome sauce ladies and gentlemen.

We are showing off the prototypes of the belts at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England this Saturday and Sunday (Feb 27 and 28).

If you are able to make it out, we'd love to give you a demo.

Here's a really blurry picture of a really ugly prototype. Trust me, this looks better blurry than it does in focus. And I'm AWFUL with a camera. The cool thing? the round part at the end is about the size of the entire design for the next version! Hooray for SMD!

So, I've finished work on a prototype for Haptic Guide Mark IIIa.

This is a fork from the normal development direction into a wrist-mounted unit as opposed to the next belt.
Essentially this version was created as a test platform for a variety of approaches for the next iteration of the belt. I figured that the testing was pushing me towards a completed unit, so I might as well finish the last 20% and get the thing hammered into a useable form. I'm testing a variety of things this time, including a switch from a pedometer to tell me if the compass is oriented properly to produce the best reading. I'm also testing an interface for peripheral sensors, so if we want to add additional systems we now have a platform to test them.

I'm setting the wrist unit up to function as a clock as well, because frankly if something is going to sit where I keep my watch it should darn well be able to tell me the time. Also, I've set up a set of 12 LEDs arranged in a circle instead of the standard 8 to make telling time less painful for my poor inadequate brain. In later versions of the belt I'm considering adding a routine to relay time to the belt wearer as a binary sequence on the 8 motors. Once that's in place the options for using the motors to communicate anything to the user beyond the standarrd compass heading becomes an option.

So, the features being tested on this unit include:

PWM control (via external chip) for finer control
Power management features to extend battery life
orientation sensor for compass
Secondary sensor interface
Clock functionality
Messaging functionality (hooray my old brain gets to learn to read binary again!)


Depending on how successful this testing is I'll know what directions to take the hardware for the next belt. Right now it's all about cost reduction, and trying to hit a sub $100CDN price point.

Here's a really blurry picture of a really ugly prototype. The cool thing? the round part at the end is about the size of the entire design for the next version! Hooray for SMD!