We are hiring software engineers and designers. We make our own desktop CNC machines and write software for the whole stack, from machine firmware all the way through to the browser-based design app, Easel. Our main focus right now is (1) making new ways of designing in 3D and (2) making the feedback loop between design, simulation and carving faster. That means lots of unique technical and UI/UX challenges.
If you are interested in design interfaces, how/why people learn to make, computational geometry, or if getting involved in educating the next generation of makers, we are looking to talk to you.
To me it is a combination of repetition and a confusing flow. It feels like it the author kind of discovered the interesting bits as she/he went. But I don't want to be a Criticizing Craig, so here is a (hopefully helpful) breakdown:
“When the voice coil is driven at the resonant frequency of the spring, the entire actuator vibrates with a perceptible force. Although the frequency and amplitude of a linear resonant actuator may be adjusted by changing the AC input, the actuator must be driven at its resonant frequency to generate a meaningful amount of force for a large current.”
Ok, got the basic principle and the key constraint (resonance) in the first paragraph.
“The voice coil remains stationary inside of the device while it produces a vibration and presses against a moving mass. By driving the magnetic mass up and down against the spring, the LRA as a whole will be displaced and produce a vibration.”
The first sentence feels like a repetition of the basic principle, but I get that (together with the second sentence) there is a subtle point being made: the whole assembly vibrates. I'd cut the first sentence or make the comparison more clear: “Although the voice coil is stationary within the LRA, … the LRA as a whole moves.”
The speaker comparison is good for illustrating the resonance constraint, but the conclusion simply repeats rather than expound on the principle. Leading the reader can make the implicit connection more obvious and avoid repetition: “While speakers can be driven at arbitrary frequencies, the physical spring within an LRA imposes a …”
“Rather than directly transferring the force produced by the voice coil to the skin, the device optimizes for power consumption by taking advantage of the resonant frequency of the spring. If the voice coil pushes the magnetic mass against the spring at the spring’s resonant frequency, the device can produce a vibration of higher amplitude more efficiently.”
This paragraph reintroduces resonance, but as an efficiency improvement. It feels repetitive, but there is an important point here that is left as a connection for the reader to draw: Offset rotating masses don't use resonance and draw much more power. I would actually use this in the leader. Instead of introducing resonance as a just a component of the system, make it the key. Instead of “that is DC and this is AC” (the impression I got from the first paragraph, lead with “that uses brute force and this uses a cool property of spring systems: resonance.” The latter is much more interesting, and can help reduce the repetition.
“Although the frequency can be changed, the LRA will typically be operated within a narrow frequency range to optimize its power consumption—if the device is driven at the resonant frequency of the spring, it will consume less power to produce a vibration of equal magnitude”
Repeating the basic principle again. Get rid of this and get right to the next sentence about how you can use a fixed frequency/varying frequency.
Using github to search like this reminds me of how a CS professor of mine would show the "best commit messages of the year" (homework was submitted via git) by looking for various patterns like all caps, all symbols, etc.
I write software for desktop CNC machines, and am a maker myself who periodically sells his work. I constantly am thinking about what it means to be 'hand-made'. The machines I write software for can only make one thing at a time, it isn't large scale manufacturing. The designs are hand-crafted, I suppose, but they are of course made digitally. The machine is controlled by the computer, so the process of carving doesn't involve any manual skill. However a piece is rarely 'finished' the moment it comes off the machine. An added level of complexity, for myself at least, is that I am writing the software that controls the machine. Does that make the things my machine creates any 'more hand-crafted'? I like to think it does, but I'm not sure!
According to him that's what the books core idea seems to boil down to, but I think I'd bring the book with me because of all the other things as well: "fugues and canons, logic and truth, geometry, recursion, syntactic structures, the nature of meaning, zen buddhism, paradoxes, brain and mind, reductionism and holism, ant colonies, concepts and mental representations, translation, computers and creativity, consciousness and free will, sometimes even art and music of all things!" -preface to the twentieth anniversary edition
The single most important book I think I've ever read. I've never read something that I kept coming back to year after year, reading a little farther into it every time. If I was stranded on a desert island with only one book, I'd bring this one. It would keep me busy for more than long enough.
We are hiring software engineers and designers. We make our own desktop CNC machines and write software for the whole stack, from machine firmware all the way through to the browser-based design app, Easel. Our main focus right now is (1) making new ways of designing in 3D and (2) making the feedback loop between design, simulation and carving faster. That means lots of unique technical and UI/UX challenges.
If you are interested in design interfaces, how/why people learn to make, computational geometry, or if getting involved in educating the next generation of makers, we are looking to talk to you.
https://boards.greenhouse.io/inventables/jobs/97588#.WBeb7uE...