O frabjous day! I’m happy to report that Richard Siemens, our 1997 Siplace 80-S20 dual-head, conveyorized Pick & Place machine is fully operational! The significance of this milestone has everything to do with the fact that we bought it in September and have been debugging and repairing it ever since. Here’s us celebrating in our parking lot with a few bottles of Prosecco.

Do you have a kit of Cubelets? Every single Cubelet contains a few tiny circuit boards, and most of these boards have quite a few fiddly little electronic components soldered on top: resistors, capacitors, microcontrollers, etc. If you’re holding a Cubelet in your hands, you might be surprised to know that the bulk of those components were placed onto the board manually, with tweezers, by one of our assembly elves. We’ve manually placed about 30,000 boards worth of components by hand! And that’s crazy, as most visitors to our factory have pointed out. No longer.

We began shopping for a Pick & Place machine this Summer. We’ve spent a lot of time playing electronics with our friends at SparkFun and have been inspired by the creative ways that they manage to manufacture their products here in Boulder, CO. They’re currently making use of three P&P machines: two small Manncorp models and a brand-new fancy Mydata monster that they’ve written about recently. The Mydata machine is pretty incredible, but it’s also $170,000. Yeah. So we bought an $11,000 used Siemens machine that had been sitting in a shuttered factory in Mexico. Yes, we found sand inside.

I’m way too excited about Richard’s current functionality to turn this into a rant about a certain shady industrial equipment dealer. The short version is that the machine, advertised as “tested and working,” needed a few thousand dollars worth of parts, some motor control boards, belts, hoses, all new software, and a few hundred hours worth of tinkering. Four months later, here we are. But look how fast!

Fast indeed. Richard (we named him after our favorite aerobics instructor) is rated at 21,000 components per hour. 2 heads! 12 nozzles on each head! Nozzle garages! I never thought that I’d be so excited by assembly robots.

Somehow I ended up as a mentor for Haxlr8r, the Shenzhen-based hardware startup incubator.  I think they just wanted my name on the list — I haven’t actually mentored anyone or heard anything from the Haxlr8r people in two years other than an interview request from Zach Smith, who manages the whole thing.  I picked one question to answer, but since they never published it, I guess my answer was wrong.  Here it is anyway for posterity and your enjoyment.

Zach:  Many have said that the hardware landscape is looking more like software with lower costs to entry, better prototyping tools, and faster turnaround times.  Do you think this is accurate?  What are the critical/important differences in your mind? 

Eric:  No way.  Maybe on the same sort of evolutionary time scale upon which humans become more like birds whenever people who can jump really high have kids, but nowhere near close.  Software is often really easy to make and distribute, but hardware is hard.

We’re getting close to having Tony Stark basements.  The prototyping shop at Modular Robotics is pretty awesome; we can make complex, high-resolution electromechanical thingamajigs really quickly.  We can make things in our shop that we couldn’t have made five years ago.  We can iterate on designs for tiny robots several times in a day!  But the engineers working in our fancy shop only create a few of anything, not thousands, and it always takes an obscene amount of money, time, and energy.

The critical difference between making hardware and software is that we’ve got a pretty amazing replication and distribution mechanism in place for software.  Write a browser extension, upload it to SourceForge, and you’re done.  Hardware needs to be soldered and tested and packed in little boxes then placed on the brown truck.  It’s really not trivial.  Hardware has mass.

Comparing something that has mass to something that doesn’t is a nice place for metaphors but is hard to digest.  It’s like comparing ideas to tires, rock ballads to doll house furniture.  But hardware doesn’t have to be like software!  If everyone could make and replicate any sort of hardware stuff we want, we’d be buried in grey electromechanical goo.  SourceForge has more than 300,000 simultaneous projects that are currently ready for you to download for free.  If we could make almost instant, almost infinite copies of everyone’s shitty toy robot kit, we’d be in trouble.

Remember Eric’s blog post in August when he announced that Modular Robotics had received funding and was hiring some key positions to help grow the company? Four weeks after that post, I joined the ModBot team to run Supply Chain. Shortly thereafter we hired Tascha to run Finance. A few days later our pick and place machine arrived to keep the re-flow oven company. The progression is as striking as it is exciting: assemble an incredible team to design Cubelets, make product, ship product, get funding, make capital investments, hire some managers, make more Cubelets…Modular Robotics is growing up!

My job is to make sure we have the right material, at the right place, at the right time and at the right price, so that at any time we choose, we can drop the hammer and build, test and ship a ton of Cubelets.

Enough about the j-o-b. I wanted to share a quick story about how insanely cool it is to work here.

A few weeks ago I decided we needed to do a physical inventory count. Many of our components are packaged in reels, and we have a lot of reels. I went into Eric’s office and said, “I think we need to buy a reel counter.” He asked why. I provided the business case. He agreed and said “yep, let’s grab Matt and Jon and go buy a reel counter”. Road trip! Ten minutes later we were at a store that sells such things, looking at a vintage APS GC12000. It even had an instruction manual. Matt, Eric and Jon all looked at me and said, “what do you think?” (Point of information – while I have seen hundreds of counters, and relied on their output countless times, I’ve never actually used a reel counter…) How to respond? I pushed some buttons (nice tactile feedback). Spun the reels (they spun). Plugged it in (it lit up). Lifted it (good heft). “It’ll do. Let’s offer them $300 less than the asking price and see if they bite.” We did, and they did. Ten minutes later we were back in the factory lighting it up. Soon after, we realized we had an incomplete instruction manual (not a problem, with no fewer than five engineers on staff) and the the reel counter was missing a handle. From across the room and behind the pick and place machine, Matt says, as casual as if he’s going to the store to get some milk, “oh, thats ok, I’ll just draw up a handle in SolidWorks and we’ll make one tonight in the 3D printer.”  How cool is that?

Buying a reel counter seems like an innocuous capital expenditure. And it is. But it was the first step in a more critical process. The reel counter is a tool that allowed me to establish real Inventory On-Hand numbers, which allowed me to calculate Work-In-Progress, which gave me a snapshot of what we had versus what we needed, which allowed me to order the right amount of material, which led to the selection of new suppliers, which led to important redundancy in the supply chain and better raw material, which leads to more and better Cubelets. Whew!

That’s it. Thank you for following us and being patient as the company has approached adolescence. I will post again shortly with some exciting production updates.

I’m super-excited to announce our launch of the Bluetooth Cubelet today.  It’s not just another Cubelet.  You can use it to pair your Cubelets robot with your phone — read sensor values from far away or remote control your mobile robot.  Or you can connect your Cubelets robot to your PC and reprogram any connected Cubelets using the Cubelets CODE web application and a simple API.

This changes everything.  You can re-program a Think Cubelet to behave like a different Think Cubelet.  You can reprogram your Sense Cubelets to sense and then Invert the signal, removing the Inverse block from your robot.  You can roll up your sleeves and reprogram some Cubelets to do lots of the wacky things that have been suggested in the forums. We can’t wait to see what you build.

We’ve been working on the Bluetooth Cubelet and its supporting software (Control and Code) for more than a year.  For us, that’s an eternity!  But this is not a simple project, and we wanted to get it right.  Massively parallel tangible real-time modular distributed robot programming.  You know, for kids!

I love our lighthearted Cubelets! video, which has reached over 350,000 viewers so far.  And now we also have a more “serious” video about Cubelets, courtesy of Inside Science TV, which is produced by the American Institute of Physics.  The short video is titled “Making a Robot is now Child’s Play”, and may be a more suitable introduction for those who wonder about the educational value of Cubelets.   Cool to be rubbing shoulders with pieces like “Physicists Detect New Heavy Particle”!

Big day at Modular Robotics yesterday.  We were scrambling to make some last minute preparations for the evening’s Cubelets Hackathon when the Internet 2012 Bus Tour rolled up.  The red and blue bus just started a two week trip across the country to raise awareness for net neutrality.  It’s organized by Reddit, and is actually McCain’s old campaign bus.  It’s been re-wrapped, as you can see, and we assume cleaned out very well.  Anyway, Alexis and Erik were on board, along with about ten members of the press and various other interesting people from AgLocal, AdWeek, and the Internet Association.

We played with Cubelets, walked around our factory, and talked a little about how crazy it is to think about manufacturing consumer electronics in the USA these days.  We ate little cheese Cubelets, drank coconut water, and had some fun with the Rally Fighter, Local Motors‘ short-run, semi-custom, community designed car.

Why did the bus decide to stop at Modular Robotics?  It turns out that they just asked around for the coolest company in town and found us.  Awesome.  But there’s a deeper synergy at work here that might not be apparent at first glance.

Cubelets are the building blocks of intelligent systems.  But we’re taking a huge departure from the way the field of artificial intelligence has worked for the last 60 years.  Normal artificial intelligence is “top down.”  We write programs for robots telling them to do one thing, then another, then wait for something, etc.  Instead of writing a big fat complicated program for a robot, Cubelets are “bottom up”.  Their behavior emerges from lots of little simple robots each doing their own thing.  The magic happens when they all get together and we see things like steering or intentional-looking behaviors like wall avoidance or alarm-sounding just sort of happen.

This is kind of how the Internet works too: it’s a tremendously huge system that relies on many, many users and devices and programs to run, and it gives rise to all sorts of higher-level emergent elements (like bullying or social networking or SETI@Home) that couldn’t happen without all of the complexity at its base.

The thing is, it’s really hard to make positive changes in a huge complex system from the top-down.  Yes, we’d all like artists to make a buck, and yes, we’d all like movies to keep getting made, but we can’t get there with ham-fisted approaches like SOPA or PIPA.  We can’t put the future of the internet into a few senators’ hands who don’t even have a clear idea of what it is or how it works.

We need a more nuanced approach to solving problems in complex systems.  Instead of letting the RIAA dictate the rules, we need to look a little deeper and understand how and why patterns emerge in complexity and how even tiny changes can have ripple effects.  This is what Cubelets were designed for: to give kids a model to build their own complex systems and start to develop intuitions about how the world works.  To see that real solutions are not black or white, red or blue, but require research, critical thinking, and understanding.

Well.  We had a lot of fun with the merry pranksters on the bus.  Thanks for coming!  Here’s my favorite tweet about the Bus Tour’s visit to Modular Robotics.

Indeed!

Credits: Jon Hiller took these great photos.  Thanks Jon!

I’m not a fan of the US Postal Service.  They’re basically bankrupt, they’re bloated, they’re always increasing prices, and they deliver so much junk to me that I feel guilty for cutting down the rainforest every time I check my PO Box.  They’re always losing my mail too.  But, they’re cheap.  A lot cheaper than UPS for international Cubelets shipments, and a little bit cheaper than UPS for domestic shipments.  We just added a couple of USPS shipping options to the site, so if you’re in Japan or Finland, we can now ship your Cubelets to you for $40 instead of $140.

Here at Modular Robotics we’ve been working hard on an exciting new product that enables people to wirelessly control and reprogram their Cubelets.  We’re getting ready to release that system to the world, but thought we’d give our friends in Boulder a sneak peek.  So!  We’re hosting a Hackathon to give you a chance to play with Cubelets and be the first to try out our new Bluetooth Cubelet.

If you’re in the area on October 4th, swing by our headquarters and join us for an evening of building robots, eating pizza, and maybe even winning a set of Cubelets!  The programming is done with text-based C code, so it’s probably not for the young ones.  12+ is about right.  We have limited space so please RSVP in the comments section below.

When:

October 4th, 2012, 6:00pm

Where:
Modular Robotics
3085 Bluff St. Boulder CO 80301
[As you head East on Bluff (from 30th), you'll see our low brick building on your left.  Pull into the parking lot behind (and just after) the building and you'll see us.]

What to Bring:
A Windows laptop with a Bluetooth adapter, and/or an Android device.