akumpf

There are a lot of cottage food bakers out there, making/selling artisan bread at farmers' markets and through side shelves in established retail/grocery spaces.

The big issue with home baking is scale -- there are often regulations that limit what you can use (often it MUST be in the kitchen within your primary residence, and it can ONLY use a standard residential oven). And if you can't make many loaves, the prices end up being about double compared to industrial produced bread. Hence the $10-25 per loaf at the farmers' market.

So I've been reverse engineering what's possible, given the cottage food law constraints (specifically in Ohio, but applies to a lot of states).

There are lots of non-standard things that I've found actually work quite well for me: Kneading the dough by slowly rotating it in a dough tub (no stretch-and-folds). 18hr+ room temperature bulk fermentation (using just a few grams of starter). Standard oven with 2 "decks" using baking stones. Using only a 10-15 minute bench rest (microproof) then quickly shaping loaves before going straight in the oven (no pans, parchment, banneton, or couche).

So I've put it together as open research for anyone to use. There's also a dynamic recipe page with my production quantities for various breads over here: https://palmbread.com/open_research/baker_recipes/

If you've ever considered baking bread at scale, please give it a look and let me know what you think. Thanks!

Some context: I have kids and I build functional prototypes as my day job.

There are tons of circuit kits out there, but I’ve been surprised/disappointed with how pretty much all of them are designed. So I’ve built out a new approach that uses a graphical sticker on a breadboard to make it easy, but still uses the raw components to make it work so the maker can gain comfort/experience with real engineering.

I also wanted the kit to do something truly interesting/useful. Not just blinking a light or mimicking something else you can easy find elsewhere. This first kit is a fully generative music box that can play millions of different song patterns.

Would love to hear thoughts from the other maker/engineer parents on here :)

Five years ago I worked on an app called Fiddlewax Pro (later renamed Firo); an advanced chord/drum/keyboard/looper. Unfortunately, as iOS updated, the app eventually stopped working and fell out of fashion.

Firo4 is an attempt to bring an old app (that I truly loved both making and using) back to life.

Direct link to video if you just want to see it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtpXpVq30dY

Since it's a continuation of an old app (that originally sold for $20, but was made Free for its final days), launching Firo4 for Free seems like the right move for now. Still deciding where to take its revenue model, but it definitely feels good to move it out of the archived box and get it running again.

Any suggestions on what kind of pricing models are best for a situation like this?

Direct link to the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEhSXTKpjQE

Also, all the design files are open source and available on Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3649542

Let me know if you have any thoughts/questions!

Direct link to video here: https://youtu.be/kWE8AzJY8qc

I'm the dev. Let me know if you have any questions/thoughts!

Direct link to a video of the TuneFast Harp here: https://youtu.be/yGjTQOmBWsM

And here are the files/info if you want to print your own: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2709667

In short, Picnic is google docs-style collaboration for graphic design using just a synced filesystem (google drive, dropbox, sync, local shared folder, etc.).

There's a video of it in action at the bottom of the page.

It's essentially google-docs style collaboration (multiple users in a single doc), but doesn't require a dedicated server and has to get around using all the diff/match/patch magic you can apply when working mainly with text (since Sketch uses lots of binary files).

What's particularly cool is making an existing app collaborative by simply creating a plugin and leveraging realtime syncing services. Curious how many other apps could use this same approach. :)

To answer #2:

If you inspect most of the FDM (maker-style, RepRap, etc.) printers, you'll notice that they themselves are constructed of 3D printed parts. But the way they use the parts is a lot different than most end-users (a single purpose item that works stand-alone; like a statue, cup, wall hook, etc.).

Instead, the way the 3D printed parts on the printer are used (in general) is by combining the strengths/attributes of multiple materials. All fasteners are standard metal parts, with mating metal nuts (often embedded or even hot-inserted into the back of a printed part). Precision bushings are press-fit into printed parts to use along steel guide rails.

The TAZ assembly docs show a lot of that thinking, so I thought I'd link over to it in the write-up.

In short, it's the kind of thing that I'd love to see more of because it leverages the best properties of multiple materials instead of being all one or the other. :)

This has been a lot of fun exploring over the past few days. Let me know if you have suggestions/questions about this kind of hybrid approach using 3D printers.

Anything else you'd like to see printed with multiple materials?

*Under Pressure = Barometer (which is correlated with various weather patterns and doesn't require other connectivity to function).

Full disclosure: I'm one of the devs and I would greatly appreciate hearing your thoughts about LightNudge. What do you like about it? What is confusing or unappealing about it?

Any high-level thoughts of running a physical startup workshop like this in the Midwest?

Is making tech things by hand still something people are excited about?

All thoughts/suggestions greatly appreciated!

For those a bit more technically minded and looking to choose colors in an optimal way (for things like data visualization, intuitive interfaces, etc.), look into Munsell colors!

I made a quick tool for playing with Munsell colors and explaining how to use them here:

http://research.kumpf.cc/MunsellForDesigners/

Cheers, Adam

The "Under the hood" visualization is awesome. I think more projects need to take the time to communicate details like this (without just big blobs of text or links to big piles of source code without a high-level overview).

cheers!

Edit: link directly to the diagram here -- http://www.deepstream.io/#segment-diagram

I ask because this is a major hurdle with the Diaspora* model, in my opinion. I just created two accounts with the same username on different servers to test, and the fact that I could do that bummed me out a bit...

It's great that my data can be free, but if my account is tied to a specific host and I must make a separate, unique account with another host later then I'm still substantially locked in. Essentially, switching accounts likely means all my social connections will have out-of-date contact info, urls, etc. when I switch.

If, however, my user ID is global across the distributed network and there is a way to gracefully transfer my account/data/info to another server seamlessly (without my social connections even knowing/caring about it) then I think distributed social networks like GNU Social could be a game changer.

How hard/easy is it to switch servers and retain @accountname references (i.e. your username)?

When faced with a big list of servers to choose between, my hesitation is that I'll pick one now and realize later that another one is better. For example, I may someday want to host GNU social myself, but if I do so will I essentially be starting over (even if I can retain my data, will my connections still retain a relationship to the new server?).

A nice little diagram and/or technical details page would be much appreciated :)

Serial/UART is just a simple way of organizing how 1s and 0s are sent (start bit, data bits, optional parity, and stop bit, all at an agreed upon baud rate).

To send data to the robot, the transmitter (computer + headphones) encodes 1s as tone (9876Hz) and 0s at another frequency (12345Hz).

So for the decoding circuit all you really need are 3 stages: a microphone, an amplifier (opamp chip), and something that can very tightly look to see if the 0s frequency (12345Hz) is present since UART rests high when idle. A phase locked loop (PLL) is excellent for frequency locking, but can be a little hairy to use. The LM567 tone decoder chip however has a PLL inside but is a simple chip to work with.

A little variable resistor next to the tone decoder is used to precisely dial in the frequency. Lots of other resistors and capacitors in there to hook everything together, but that's essentially it. Does that make sense? Happy to answer more questions if you have any :)

Circuit schematic for reference here: http://research.kumpf.cc/2015-ProgrammingWithHeadphones/imgs...

Another interesting write-up about Canny on IEEE Spectrum:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/canny-robot-...

Would love to hear thoughts from other engineers and designers oabout where you think a programming interface like this could lead.

The audio used to program the robot is analog (tones in the form of sine waves), but the data itself modulating the tone is binary.

More specifically, it's AFSK. See the diagram/info on the Wikipedia page about for a more detailed explanation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-shift_keying#Audio_F...

Direct link to video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=780A0cv1qgA

Any comments or questions about how the robot/audio programming works are more than welcome :)

More info about how "programming with headphones" works here:

http://research.kumpf.cc/2015-ProgrammingWithHeadphones/

Direct link to video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=780A0cv1qgA

Still one more month to go as a free app, but in the first 10 days, Firo has gained 80,000 users.

Source: I'm the dev. :)

Full disclosure: I'm the dev. Let me know if you have any thoughts/suggestions :)

The app used to be a paid app that cost $20, but I decided to make it free for 45 days to open things up a bit. If you have an iPad and you like music, please try it out and play around.

Also, there's more detailed info about the app here (it was previously called Fiddlewax Pro). https://fiddlewax.com/pro/

I'm the dev behind Firo and wanted to shake things up to reach more potential users... So I just decided to go for it. :)

Curious to hear what the more business savvy here think about making a paid app free for a while. Did I just shoot myself in the foot? Or is this a good idea?

Thanks!

I kept it as simple as possible. I was hesitant to even have a header at the top, but heard some feedback from people that thought it should have a name and a way to share it.

Also, the source code is now online here: https://github.com/akumpf/bgaudio

Looks to be offline. Perhaps delete this and re-post once you're back online? :)

A brief overview: bg is meant to be a simple interface for adding background audio while you work or relax.

I'm the dev. Let me know what you think :)

I think HN and reddit are both pretty democratic (everyone can submit and vote).

Of course, people can always try to get their friends to vote, but in my experience the feedback is pretty even-handed and proportional to what is posted. :)

Any other places you'd suggest?

In general, while I think more things like Hacker News are a good thing, Product Hunt feels elitist to me.

The people who are already in the know and well connected can get lots of publicity, and those who are more independent or just starting out either can't post or don't get recognized.

I've also had multiple friends (who are much better connected in SF) create big roll-out plans where they get all their friends to quickly up vote them. While it's not technically a problem, it takes away the real test of "is the idea worth voting for" and turns it into more of a popularity contest.

Just my 2 cents. Maybe others have had great experiences (and certainly some of the "products" posted are cool), but I'm skeptical of Product Hunt in general...

My suggestion is to stick with truly democratic places to share your new things (if you want more unbiased feedback), and submit press/news directly to places -- they want good stories and interesting ideas/products to share with their readers if what you have is a genuine contribution.

Good luck!