EMC testing preparations

Exhausting preparations for EMC testing. This was postponed from Tuesday due to the fact that the lab ran out of ferrite beads of the right size. We've got these ferrite pieces now and three complete sets ready for testing. We're waiting for the lab to reschedule us - we probably will end up going this week or early next week.

Glow in the dark (phosphorescent) rubber parts

STAGE 1

First of all, let's admire these beautiful parts.

Just charged in the sun and taken to a dark room:



Another shot:



This is an adjusted version, more representative of the actual brightness the eye sees. It won't help much if your monitor is much brighter or darker than ours...



Some details...



This is what the pigments look like, notice that the two colors on the right don't seem to shine at all and that's because the room wasn't perfectly dark. From left to right: Yellow-Green, Blue-Green (aqua), Purple, Blue, Orange-Red. Blue and Red are the two weakest glowing colors, although red is a color rarely seen in phosphorescent products and it's really neat when you are in total darkness and it's just charged.



Now, you all know the yellow-green color, this is what's been used for the past decade in all manner of toys and emergency signs. However there was a breakthrough a few years ago when a better compound was discovered that glows much brighter and for a longer time. So if you've played with some glow in the dark toy a while ago you may be surprised. When this pigment is fully charged and taken to a dark room it glows as strong as those glow sticks. The benefit of using this color is that it's the brightest and fastest charging (and longest lasting). However it's not so sexy just because it's been overused.



Blue-green (aqua) is just a notch less bright and long lasting than yellow-green, but it's not something you see often, and so we prefer it.



Here's the back view.



Blue color isn't that far from aqua, but it has very poor performance; it's not nearly as bright and the glow fades very quickly. This is not a winner.



Purple is very hard to capture; this is the original shot:



And this is a color adjusted version that looks closer to what the naked eye sees.



Purple is really awesome, it's a color that is at the far end of the visible spectrum and can't be reproduced very well by your monitor. This pigment looks a lot like the UV lights in a disco. It charges in the sun just fine, however we've had trouble charging it with household lights. We'll try again tonight and post results. All these pigments have very different properties deriving from the quantum-mechanical ways in which photons are stored and reemitted so sometimes they respond well to a narrow range of wavelengths. Sunlight has them all so it's no problem. UV lights should work just fine. Regular lighting... for purple it depends a lot! For aqua and yellow any light is ok. Our theory: the pigments need a charging wavelength that has higher energy than the photons reemitted. So yellow takes anything, but purple needs UV... ?

Now red (orange-red, really, but more red than orange) is hard to explain. This color is totally cool, but it's only bright enough to appreciate in all its beauty for half a minute or so, and you need real darkness to see it - not quite total darkness, but if you've got any sunlight at all coming in it won't look like it's glowing at all.

This is a shot taken after about a minute of charging. The room wasn't perfectly dark.



This is an adjusted version, showing what the eye really sees (actually not exactly, there's a very low wavelength red component here that the camera doesn't capture, these unusual wavelengths (deep red and deep purple), which the monitor doesn't reproduce, are the ones that look coolest because the eye isn't exposed to their hues very often).



Please note that if we wanted to make this look cool in the photos we could have taken the pictures 1 second after charging and they would all look like neon lights. However the purpose here is to achieve some degree of realism...

Here is a brightness comparison. Red vs Purple after 20 seconds of charging, room not perfectly dark.



So what's the winner? We like aqua a lot because it glows with some strength and it's not the usual yellow-green. Both yellow green and blue green (Aqua) glow strong enough that the little grommet illuminates surfaces it rests on. Purple does that to some extent too but for a shorter time.



Of course if you happen to be in a club this thing should just glow like crazy because UV is what it likes to eat for breakfast... But we haven't tried a bright UV light from a reasonable distance because... we don't have one. Instead, this is what a tiny purple led does when it's pushed right into the grommet. The light from this LED is not bright at all because it emits only purple and some UV. All the glow you see is from reemitted energy.



If the enclosure is to be clear, the war is on between purple and aqua. We need to test at night, and with different lights especially a real UV light. It's hard to monitor glow decay during the day because the parts look like they're dead very quickly but they aren't really.

The final consideration is the color these parts have in normal lighting (when you can't see them glowing at all).

Purple is pure white in normal lighting, which makes it the best looking. All other colors look off-white (slightly yellowish), except for blue which is almost pure white (but doesn't glow much at all) and red (which looks pale orange).

STAGE 2

We tried the pink transparent enclosure with the purple silicone parts:



Not much difference in the glow color.

Then we remembered that we have some spray painted enclosures on hand.
Black looks mean:





White looks very futuristic with purple:



And even better with aqua:





But as far as futurism goes the winner here is clearly the silver spray painted enclosure with purple glow in the dark silicone:







*This* is something that an advanced civilization would pass down to help train Earth males!

Stage 2 pictures were taken under favorable lighting conditions (light enough to see the enclosure color, dark enough to see the pigments). They show glow levels very soon (seconds) after charging in sunlight for a few seconds (on a not particularly bright day).

Opinions welcome!

Oh, last one: Tron style...

Zhongda textile market visit

The body band eyelet gals were confronted with the extremely poor quality of their product. They saw all the eyelets had come off and promised to try again and do it right. Apparently, since the body band is stretchable, it is not easy to add eyelets (has there ever been a part of our product that was easy to make?)

The trick seems to involve stitching some patches of non stretchable textile onto the body band where the eyelets should go. This way those portions won't stretch and the eyelets won't come off. Or something. Not too interested how they do it, really, as long as those things stop coming off.

As for the other company (supposed to print the thunder logo), unfortunately we were overconfident about being able to navigate this huge market. After two hours walking around and finding miscellaneous interesting objects, buttons and bands it became obvious we no longer know where they're located. No worries, we've got a business card (and probably should have brought that along) and will call them and see why they haven't sent anything and why they aren't returning calls.

Some misc pictures follow:
...

Meeting with new overlay manufacturer

The difference is obvious. What we were given by our current supplier is pretty much a sticker, not an overlay.

Overlays are a lot more rigid, and there is a clearly discernible transparent layer of material above the printed surface which gives the overlay that distinct "hardware look".

We figured out and tested the material and thickness from their labeled samples on our real plastic parts, and we're waiting for this manufacturer to update an old quote given to us many months ago and get back to us on whether they can play with us until we get some volume or not.

Their overlays are used for bank hardware and point of sale displays and keypads. The polycarbonate layer is nice and thick. The result is very professional. It is likely that their screen printing resolution is also higher.

Monday, another guy will drive here to meet us and he will go through our requirements. If we can convince one or the other we're back on track with the overlays and this time these guys are local. If the color's off by one percent we'll knock at their door and choose pantone buckets ourselves :)

Tomorrow we should be able to visit the Zhongda market again, and visit the thunder printing guys who didn't print the thunder, and the eyelet gals who make the eyelets that fall off in 1 minute. We'll take pictures of this enormous textile and clothing part market. Forget the terracotta warriors - this market is one of the things to see in China!

Incredible lawlessness on the streets. Cars, pedestrians, bikes, bicycles, man-cart hybrids crossing in all directions oblivious to traffic lights - and all honking, beeping and shouting like a giant orchestra.

A variety of objects including heavy rolls of textile poorly loaded on cheap bicycle carts sometimes dropped on pedestrians. It's the Chinese Far West, and we are in town with a mission: the Body Band!

DL2K-LINK bugfix

Device crashed after wireless reprogramming through a USB hub. Bug tracked down to latency issues and fixed. Meeting with new overlay guy in half an hour.

We give up...

Not on the product of course, but on trying NOT to publish any pictures of the less than perfect overlays we've received. We've chosen a few shots where the defects aren't so evident (except the colors which are way off) and here they are.

1. DL2K-LINK is *almost* perfect except for one dimension (not visible in the picture, but important when placing the overlay) and the button hole size and position.



2. The remote is the main problem. Although it looks good here, the overlay isn't flat so when you look at it very closely it's sort of cheap looking. We're meeting with another supplier in 1 hour (he drove all the way from another city to meet us on a Saturday!) ... you may also notice one of the buttons has paint coming off that's because you're not supposed to paint rubber like this anyway, it was just a test; we'll get the *real* black rubber keypads next week. Lastly, the clear plastic with no color dyes is by far the best looking...



3. As you can see all text is printed in "mirror" color (if that's even a color). The text has been made too bold by an unauthorized modification to our design



4. It's hard to take digital pictures in the darkness; here you can *more or less* see the effect of light being transported around the edges of the enclosure by the polycarbonate plastic. Looks much better to the naked eye.



As we explained yesterday, the big problems are how the overlays have been cut which results in excess glue, and the thickness. We are now trying to find a new supplier so that the final result can look as good or even better than what you see here. Thickness of the polycarbonate layer on the overlays is very important because it gives the overlay thickness (so the impression is to look through a thin layer of glass), and it also confers rigidity which is essential trying to position these properly. An error in positioning results in bumps and imperfections on the surface of the overlay.

Final note: the DL2K-LINK is shown in pink here but eventually the color of all plastic parts will have to be identical as all parts are created from the same mold.

You'll probably think we're being too picky if you just see these pictures... please have faith, when we get the good overlays we will post comparisons so you can see the current defects in all their horrible deformity :)

To be fair though let's take a look at what about 2 years ago was our state of the art remote control. Yabba dabba yucky!!!