Speeds and Feeds

I've mentioned the Homebrew Robotics Club here a few times. The club has an active mailing list. And when I found myself writing a lengthy post there over the weekend, I figured it might be of interest to the wider audience.

The post was in response to this inquiry from club president Wayne C. Gramlich, included here with his permission:

Can anybody point me a book that goes into design issues associated with assembling mechanisms out of bearings, axles, and gears? I'm looking for pretty basic stuff, like when to use a ball bearing, where to place bearings on a shaft, how to attach things to a shaft, etc. I am not interested in a book that tells me how to design a gear (or bearing), I just want to purchase those off the shelf.

My reply, edited a little for this post:

Wayne,

I have several different kinds of recommendations. All of these are books I own and have used.

Sometimes the best way to learn about a general topic is to see it applied to a specific purpose. So I'd like to start by pointing you to a couple of books aimed at race-car engineers and written by one of the best, Carroll Smith. These are the most pragmatic of all the books I'll be describing and contain a lot of information and advice I've just never seen anywhere else.

"Engineer to Win"
Carroll Smith
A great book. Pretty much a complete introduction to materials and structures for race car design. Most of it is highly relevant to robotics. A little dated (from 1984) but very little has changed since then that matters to us here. Even the few chapters on hydraulics, running a racing team, etc. will help put you in the right frame of mind for designing, building, and operating robots.

"Carroll Smith's Nuts, Bolts, Fasteners and Plumbing Handbook"
Carroll Smith
Another great book. Starts with the atomic structure of metals and proceeds quickly to a lot of very specific advice about selecting and using fasteners, including how to design structures that accept fasteners. Basically expands on three chapters on fasteners in "Engineer to Win," but I'm very glad I have both books.

I have a number of other books that provide overviews of mechanical design for specific applications. (Most of these are older books; I used to go to a lot of library used-book sales.) Here are a couple of representative examples, but I wouldn't recommend them unless you have an interest in these applications.

"Modern Marine Engineer's Manual"
Alan Osbourne

"Aircraft Layout and Detail Design"
Newton H. Anderson

Among the books I have that aren't aimed at specific applications, these stand out:

"Machinery's Handbook"
Erik Oberg et al.
A classic book, for good reason. Frequently updated, now on the 28th edition. I have the 22nd and 26th editions. A dense collection of data on literally thousands of topics related to machine design and manufacturing. Not one of the first books anyone should buy when getting into mechanical engineering, but certainly in the top 10. The current version is always a little pricey (currently $65.79 at Amazon) but slightly older editions are much cheaper and fine for most purposes unless you're pushing the state of the art.

There are also CD-ROM editions and a couple of companion books:

"Machinery's Handbook Guide to the Use of Tables and Formulas"
Erik Oberg et al.
Basically a book on how to use the handbook! Recommended.

Machinery's Handbook Pocket Companion
Richard Pohanish and Christoper McCauley
A shorter version of the handbook. I wouldn't bother.

"Mechanisms and Mechanical Devices Sourcebook, Fourth Edition"
Neil Sclater and Nicholas Chironis
I have the third edition of this book. It's basically just a big collection of mechanisms. Need to convert a circular motion into an elliptical motion? Select and apply an air spring? Assemble a sliding gear onto a fixed shaft? Over 2,000 diagrams are provided. The downside: the book often provides little more than a diagram and a few sentences of explanation.

"Detailed Mechanical Design: A Practical Guide"
James G. Skakoon
This book is written for mechanical engineers and does contain some formulas (which means it's somewhat pricey). But, in fact, you don't need to be a mechanical engineer or use the formulas at all because Skakoon explains what everything means in practical terms. For example, he gives the equation for deflection of a simply supported circular plate:

y  =

-3 * q * a^4 * (5 + v) * (1 - v²) 16 * E * t³ * (1 + v)

Complicated, sure, but Skakoon boils this formula down to the critical facts: that deflection is inversely proportional to thickness cubed and radius (or diameter) to the fourth power, and that a simply supported plate deflects four times more than a plate with fixed edges. And he reminds us that these exponential relationships mean that apparently minor manufacturing deviations can have substantial effects.

"Engineering Formulas"
Kurt Geick and Reiner Geick
This is a handy and super-dense little book. It covers all kinds of stuff, including math from arithmetic to calculus and differential equations, mechanical engineering, thermodynamics, electrical engineering, chemistry, and optics. It's very figure-heavy too, which makes the formulas easier to understand.

In terms of bang for the buck, your best bet are these free books from Stock Drive Products-Sterling Instrument (SDP-SI):

"Design and Application of Small Standardized Components (Data Book 757)"
Frank Buchsbaum et al.
Available as free PDF downloads at that link, and I see someone's selling a hardcopy on Amazon, too.

I have a 1983-vintage paperback edition. This book is also aimed at mechanical engineers, and also full of formulas, but it's still reasonably accessible with plenty of diagrams and explanations. In some cases the information is oriented toward the company's products, but mostly it's just good design advice. I mention the print edition because it actually contains more information than the downloadable PDFs, and the figures look a lot better than those in the PDFs.

Here are some other free publications from the same company, mostly catalogs, but some include selection guides and occasional application notes that come in handy too:

"Handbook Of Inch Drive Components"
"Handbook Of Metric Drive Components"
Various supplements, CDs, and catalogs

Finally, I recommend the works of Henry Petroski. He won't tell you how to design things, but he'll show you how people have designed things, which can really help you understand the design process, and especially, how it can go wrong. These are all good:

"Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design"
"To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design"
"Invention by Design; How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing"
"Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering"

Don't get me wrong-- I think the Intel-TSMC alliance announced earlier this week is a good thing for both companies.

But the official explanation, that Intel wants TSMC's help to make Atom processor cores more widely available to the industry, just doesn't strike me as a sufficient reason for the deal.

Intel hardly needs TSMC's help to make SoCs (systems on a chip). Intel has been making highly integrated devices for the embedded market, as well as PC chipsets for a long time. It already has enough of the building blocks and enough experienced engineers to make Atom-based SoC products.

And it isn't as if Intel needs better process technology, or more fabrication capacity. Intel already has more of the best fabs in the world than any other company.

What's the one thing TSMC can do that Intel can't? Operate with low gross margins. In its most recent quarter, TSMC's gross margin was only 31.3 percent, while Intel's gross margin is still an industry benchmark at 53 percent. The difference is more than Intel's net profit--that is, if Intel had TSMC's gross margins, it would be losing money.

Low-margin component suppliers are a critical element of the embedded-systems market, which Intel identified as one of its target markets for this deal. Cost is king in consumer electronics, so high-margin suppliers like Intel rarely get a chance to participate.

Similarly, as average PC-selling prices decline, a growing share of the demand for processors and chipsets drops into price ranges in which Intel just can't afford to play.

The TSMC deal is Intel's way of taking a piece of these businesses without spending much money or taking much risk. For example, TSMC is already accustomed to helping its customers make SoCs for embedded systems. Intel could build such a business itself, but not at the margins it's used to.

Intel said in its press release that it will be porting its Atom cores to TSMC's technology. This is the sort of work that can get expensive in engineering time, but it's possible that the work will be made easier by a convergence between TSMC's processes and Intel's.

Last May, Intel agreed to cooperate with TSMC and Samsung in the transition to larger 450-millimeter silicon wafers (a little less than 18 inches across, up from the 12-inch wafers used today).

This doesn't necessarily mean that the three companies will co-develop fully compatible manufacturing processes, but with the 450mm transition being slated for 2012, there's still plenty of time left to drop that other shoe.

Anyway, this new TSMC deal is merely at the earliest official stage. The companies have signed a memorandum of understanding, but they have yet to work out the details. That could take a year, and it could be another year or two before Atom-based chips are ready to start rolling through the TSMC factory.

All in all, Atom SoCs might not become available from TSMC until 2012, at which point, they could, in principle, be made on a common Intel-TSMC process.

Not that Intel would provide its really good process technology to TSMC. In chips, as in other things, quality is expensive. Intel's best process technology, which it uses primarily for microprocessors, is at the leading edge of semiconductor manufacturing, with features such as a metal electrode acting as the transistor's gate, a hafnium-based insulation between the gate and the channel, and strained silicon in the transistor channel itself (where the current flows when the transistor is on). (See this Intel presentation for more details. Incidentally, did Intel ever announce which metal it's using? If so, I can't find it.)

TSMC may not need or want any of these features, and it would make sense for Intel to keep its best process technology to itself, anyway, if only to protect its high profit margins.

Even without a leading-edge process, TSMC can still make good money from Atom-based SoCs in the embedded market. That's enough to justify TSMC's participation in the deal.

But I'm not sure that explains Intel's motivation. Sure, Intel will make money it wouldn't have made otherwise, but it will also have costs it wouldn't have had otherwise. Intel may make a few bucks per chip in intellectual-property licensing fees, and perhaps this could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but that isn't a whole lot of money to a company like Intel, which makes tens of billions of dollars a year in gross revenue.

Why else would Intel be doing this deal?

Well, I think that the chipmaker could be setting itself up to kill off three of its biggest rivals.

There's already an x86 processor company using TSMC to make (some of) its chips: Via Technologies. Via isn't a big player, but it's been a thorn in Intel's side ever since it purchased the x86 processor operations of IDT (WinChip) and National Semiconductor (Cyrix) in 1999.

Via specializes in exactly the kind of processors that Intel can't afford to sell: low-cost, highly efficient designs aimed at low-cost PCs and embedded systems. Today's Atom is better than Via's best chips, but it's also more expensive. A cheaper TSMC-sourced alternative will hurt Via badly.

Most of the same reasoning applies to ARM, which licenses its processor cores to be used in SoCs made at TSMC, among other fabs. That's almost the same business model Intel is adopting with its own TSMC deal.

ARM dominates the market for microprocessors in cell phones. Intel's current Atom processors are too expensive and too power-hungry for that market. But remember, it'll be a couple of years at least before Atom-based chips start shipping from TSMC. The Atom cores of 2011 or 2012 will be more directly competitive with ARM's cores.

So put ARM on the endangered-species list too.

There's one other company that ought to be worried by this deal, and it probably isn't one you'd expect: Nvidia.

Nvidia is generally thought to be TSMC's biggest customer. It doesn't make x86 processors (though there are persistent rumors that the company is developing one), but it does make the ARM-based Tegra family, which would run up against these future Atom chips.

It's Nvidia's graphics chips that I'm worried about, however.

Intel is developing graphics chips of its own under the Larrabee code name. I wrote about Larrabee last August, and it seemed like a bad idea to me at the time. One of my key objections, however, was that graphics chips are inherently a low-margin business due to the strong competition between AMD and Nvidia, and I didn't think that Intel could afford to drag down its margins just to compete in that market.

The TSMC deal changes all that.

Larrabee's cores aren't Atom cores, per se, but they're similar enough that Intel might consider them to be covered by the language in the TSMC partnership announcement. Or if not, agreements can always be expanded later.

Making Larrabee chips at TSMC would solve the margin problem, putting Intel's graphics chips on a level playing field with Nvidia's. Larrabee would still be at a significant disadvantage because its x86-based design isn't as well-suited to graphics acceleration as Nvidia's chips, but Intel has a special ability to sell inferior products along with other chips its customers need--especially processors. That's reportedly how Intel's slow integrated-graphics chipsets ended up in so many systems during the Windows Vista transition, leading to many disappointed customers.

Or it's possible that Intel will not allow the TSMC deal to harm these companies, if only because Intel may still be in court defending itself against AMD's antitrust lawsuit.

But I wouldn't make that assumption, and I bet that ARM, Nvidia, and Via won't either. Intel isn't the only paranoid company in this industry.

I received an interesting e-mail from a reader over the weekend. Dr. Katherine Gold, a lecturer with the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan, had some questions related to Netbooks (or small notebooks), broadband Internet access, and physical computer security. After some discussion, Dr. Gold and I decided to see if some of you might be able to help answer her questions.

Here's the situation: Dr. Gold is setting up a research project to investigate the benefits of online support groups for low- income women in the Detroit area who have recently suffered the loss of a stillborn child.

Most women benefit from such services, but they tend to be less available to the poor for because they are less likely to have computers and Internet access. Also, these women often have other children to care for, jobs to hold down, and limited transportation options, so they may not be able to take full advantage of Internet access at public libraries or other facilities.

In Dr. Gold's experience, the greatest need for support often comes at night, when such facilities aren't open, anyway.

The bottom line here is that Dr. Gold wants to supply her participants with computers they can keep at home for the duration of the study, along with some kind of Internet connection.

There are several key challenges for this approach: cost, convenience, theft resistance, ease of use, maintenance, and so on.

Dr. Gold and I agree that a Netbook--the original concept of a Netbook, a machine no larger or more expensive than necessary to provide basic Internet access--would provide a good platform for this application. A properly selected and preconfigured system would provide the necessary functionality at minimum cost. A Netbook is both less attractive to burglars and easier to secure than a desktop PC with a separate display and keyboard.

In fact, when Dr. Gold wrote to me originally, she had already identified what I think is probably the most appropriate off-the-shelf solution: the $99 special offer from Radio Shack for an Acer Aspire One with built-in wireless broadband and Wi-Fi connectivity.

The only drawback to this offer is that it requires a two-year commitment to a $60-per-month AT&T wireless data contract, which adds up to another $1,440 on top of that $99 retail price. That's a lot of money for a study like this, especially when it's scheduled to last only one year.

Dial-up access would be cheaper, but it would preclude testing the therapeutic value of high-bandwidth Internet services such as videoconferencing and would likely interfere with ordinary telephone usage, which makes it a nonstarter in many households.

Dr. Gold provided some statistics on the stillbirth problem: it's 10 = times more common than Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), involved in 1 in 100 births in the Detroit area. As one might expect, stillbirth leads to much higher rates of depression and anxiety disorders compared to live birth, and these problems have significant social costs.

Stillbirth is three times more common among African- Americans in Detroit than among whites there, explaining the special value of extending Internet-based therapy to lower-income women.

I suggested that a corporate sponsor might be willing to help defray the costs of the hardware and Internet access, and that was one of the considerations that led us to this post. It seems to me that a study like this could help demonstrate that the value of small notebooks goes well beyond students, and the value of wireless broadband goes well beyond business travelers.

I'd also like to draw attention to something that's always been obvious to me: "rugged" is the corollary to "small."

Smaller notebooks are more likely to be carried around, particularly without the protection offered by a briefcase or backpack, so they ought to be more rugged as well. There are a lot of low-cost small notebooks out there, but there are few, if any, low-cost rugged models.

Ruggedness lends itself to theft resistance as well; the traditional Kensington security slot is less effective on a machine with a flimsy plastic case and a lightweight internal metal frame.

Another thing we'd like to hear about from you folks out there--have you had any experiences with Internet-based theft deterrence and recovery services such as Computrace LoJack for Laptops? Such a service could be a helpful addition to this study and similar applications.

Feel free to comment below, or write directly to me and Dr. Gold. (Addresses obfuscated a little to deter spam.)

I'll post updates as Dr. Gold's project moves along.

I suppose most of the excitement from MacWorld Expo has died down by now, but I'd still like to talk a little about two new Mac laptops introduced at the show-- Apple's own 17" MacBook Pro, and Axiotron's Modbook Pro, a tablet computer made by repackaging the components from Apple's 15" MacBook Pro along with some new parts.

First, the Axiotron product. Externally, the ModBook Pro is radically different from the Apple notebook that provides most of its component parts.

In this publicity photo, the Modbook Pro's beveled edges are apparent. The shape is functional, making it easier to hold the device in one hand while writing on it with the other. The shape also facilitates picking up the machine from a flat surface as well as flush-mounting the Modbook Pro in a rotating mount to create a modern version of the traditional animation desk.

Inside the Modbook Pro's base unit, the original MacBook Pro components are mounted to an aluminum baseplate. The angled side pieces, machined out of a single piece of aluminum, connect that baseplate to the display and touchscreen assembly above. The result is a very solid assembly, but one that is rather heavy. The system's target weight is 6.9 pounds, though the prototype shown here was somewhat heavier. The other benefit of this assembly method is that the Modbook Pro can take any CPU-GPU combination that can go into a MacBook Pro, unlike most Windows-based Tablet PCs, which are thinner and lighter but can't handle the fastest, hottest chips. Axiotron says the Modbook Pro is the fastest tablet computer on the market (or will be, I suppose, when it ships), and as far as I know, that's true.

The new unit is scheduled to ship by June, 2009. In the meantime, Axiotron is also selling an updated version of its original Modbook, which is made from an Apple Macbook. The custom Axiotron software on the Modbook will carry over to the Modbook Pro, including the "Synergy Touch" feature which is optional on the Modbook and will be standard on the newer system. Synergy Touch provides translucent on-screen icons that can be used to control applications while the user is simultaneously drawing with the digitizer pen. It looks like an effective enhancement to the usual tablet user interface, and better for some applications than the usual combination of keyboard plus mouse or stylus.

The Modbook Pro is aimed at professional users and is priced accordingly: $4,998 and up for turnkey systems (which includes the price of the new MacBook Pro that Axiotron must buy in order to make the machine), or $3,049 and up if you send Axiotron your own MacBook Pro to be turned into a tablet.

Apple's new 17" MacBook Pro

The other big notebook news from MacWorld Expo was Apple's new 17" MacBook Pro, joining the previously announced 15" MacBook Pro and 13" MacBook systems that I reviewed in October (see "The new MacBooks: Beauty more than skin deep" and "Hands-on with the new MacBook Pro").

The 17" model has the same type of milled aluminum unibody chassis introduced with the other systems in October. Like them, it also has a sheet-aluminum bottom cover. But that cover is also the first indicator of the big difference between the 17" MacBook Pro and its 15" sibling: there's no battery cover because the battery in the 17" model isn't removable.

Instead, Apple built in a 95 watt-hour lithium polymer battery featuring two kinds of new technology: new chemistry developed by Apple's own "team of scientists and electro-chemists" (according to the page on Apple.com about the 17" MacBook Pro battery) and a more advanced battery-charging circuit also developed by Apple.

I'm familiar with the basic principles of this technology from my time at Montalvo Systems, where I led the company's system architecture work. Most notebooks treat lithium batteries as if they contain just a single cell, even though internally they consist of multiple cells in series-parallel connections.

For example, the most common six-cell notebook battery arrangement is two parallel strings of three cells in series. This produces a battery with an effective output voltage around 10.8 volts (3.6V per cell times three cells, sometimes also marked as 11.1 volts depending on the average cell voltage) and twice the current capacity of a single string of cells.

(Incidentally, while I'm on the subject: please, all you OEMs, stop referring to the ampere-hour specification of an assembled battery. This is a meaningless figure without also knowing the number of cells and the average cell voltage. It's impossible to compare amp-hour figures directly. Just state the energy capacity in watt-hours. That number is far more useful.)

When such a battery is charged only through its outermost connections-- the ground and 10.8V points-- it's inevitable that one cell will become charged before the others in each string, and one string will be fully charged before the other. Eventually, some of the cells wear out before the others because of overcharging, and some cells aren't used to their full capacity because others discharge first.

Good manufacturers do the best they can to match the cells in each battery pack, but this only goes so far. This is why some battery packs will age much faster than others even though they have the same basic components-- their individual cells weren't as well matched.

In the new MacBook Pro, according to the figures on that battery page, the built-in battery pack is configured as four cells in series by two parallel strings. But the charging circuit can sample the voltages between each cell in the pack and adjust the charging current so that each cell is charged in the best possible way. Apple's website refers only to intelligent charging, but this optimization could in principle extend to the discharge side as well, allowing the power supply to cut out each cell as it becomes drained, avoiding the stress that goes with being pushed past that point.

Once Apple decided to go with this kind of charging circuit, it may have been persuaded to make the battery non-removable simply because the battery connector would have been huge-- as many as ten high-current contacts just for the cells (the two endpoints plus three internal nodes for each string of four cells) plus more for the usual temperature sensor.

Whatever the exact mechanism, Apple says that the combination of better chemistry and better charging technology gives the 17" MacBook Pro far better battery life-- and lifespan-- than other notebooks. Apple says that the model with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU can run up to 8 hours from a single charge. That corresponds to an average power consumption of less than 12 watts.

At Montalvo, I tested the power consumption of many commercially available notebook, and in my experience, 12 watts is a very good figure for a 17" system. My own 15" MacBook Pro--now a couple of years old--consumes significantly more power than that.

More significantly, Apple claims the battery in the 17" MacBook Pro can go through 1,000 full charge cycles before its capacity drops to 80% of the original figure. Since a charge cycle is the equivalent of a 100% discharge--such as two cycles to 50%, or four cycles to 75%--this specification suggests these built-in batteries should easily last five years for most users without a substantial reduction in the battery life per charge.

Of course, in real life, this potential may be reduced if the charger causes the battery to cycle slightly while the machine is plugged in. High temperatures can also reduce battery longevity. So we won't really know how effective Apple's technology is until users have had these systems for a while.

Apple users may be interested to know that the "System Profiler" application will actually report the remaining charge capacity of a battery on the Hardware, Power page. On my MacBook Pro, the original battery-- which I leave in the system essentially all the time-- now indicates a maximum charge capacity of 1,364 mAH at 10.8V, or 14.7 WH-- a decline of over 75% from the original rated capacity. System Profiler also reports that the battery's cycle count is just 61 cycles. That's probably about right, since this battery usually sustains the machine only in standby mode for the time it takes to get from home to work and back each day.

This is a far cry from the promise on Apple's website that "a properly maintained battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 300 full charge and discharge cycles." Perhaps that promise applies only to current systems, not my one-generation-back machine, but still, I recommend taking Apple's battery-life claims with a grain of salt.

If I were in charge of Apple's battery strategy, I would think differently. I'd fit the 17" MacBook Pro for the same removable battery found in the 15" model... and also build in a smaller battery using an entirely different battery chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate (LFP) that provides inherently longer cycle life.

An LFP battery can be charged faster than a regular lithium-polymer battery, and can have twice the cycle life when properly maintained--long enough not to be a factor in the notebook's mean time to failure.

This combination would convey the additional benefit of allowing the machine's removable battery to be swapped while it continues to operate normally, even if the user is away from an AC outlet-- a substantial advantage for business travelers. No other notebook on the market has such a feature.

I'm sure there's enough room in the 17" chassis to support such a combination. It's significantly larger than the 15" model (15% more plan area, or 21 square inches), but with essentially the same internal components. Apple says that omitting the battery packaging and retaining hardware saves a lot of space, but from my own examination of the battery compartment in a scrapped MacBook Pro case assembly, I don't think that's as big an issue as Apple says.

In this photo from the "inside" of that lower case assembly with one of my auxiliary batteries installed, you can see that the MacBook Pro battery compartment and battery casing together occupy less than a quarter of an inch around most of the battery and about a half-inch on the fourth side where the power connector is located. It adds up to a reduction in plan area of about five square inches--significant but not exactly a severe loss. Even the new 17" system must have some internal protection around the battery, if only to stop foreign objects from falling in and shorting out the cells.

Other than the battery, the new 17" MacBook Pro looks very nice, just like the earlier unibody models. Plus, it's available with an optional anti-glare display. I don't know how this effect is achieved; I've used both matte-finish displays as well as CRTs with a glass-smooth face plus an anti-reflection coating. Whichever method Apple uses, it has to be better than the high-glare effect of the standard screens on the 17" and 15" MacBook Pros. I've seen these machines in various real-world conditions now, and I just couldn't live with that level of reflectivity no matter what it does for the black levels of DVD movies.

I expect I'll be in the market for a new MacBook Pro in the coming year, and at the moment, there's no doubt in my mind--it's the new 17" for me.

When Apple announced its new notebooks on Tuesday, it said the new machines would be in the company's retail stores the next day.

So I went to the Apple store at the Westfield Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara, Calif., after work on Wednesday. I got there a few minutes after 6 p.m. and discovered that an Apple technician was in the process of replacing an old MacBook Pro with the first one of the new models.

I positioned myself authoritatively about a foot from the tech's left elbow, so when he was done, I was the first customer to get my hands on the new machine.

It looked as good in real life as it does in the pictures. The tapered edges make it look thinner than it really is, considerably more svelte than the older MacBook Pros like mine.

A few things struck me about the new design. There's no latch for the lid, but some kind of cam in the hinge keeps it snugly closed unless it's opened on purpose. I don't think this would work as well with the old lid style because there's enough of an edge on there for incidental contact to overcome the hinge tension. But with the new extra-thin edge, the lid seems to resist accidental opening.

Unfortunately, like older MacBooks and PowerBooks, the machine starts to turn on when the lid is opened only slightly. I've never understood why these switches are so sensitive. It seems to me it would be better to wait until the machine is opened more like two or three inches to avoid accidental actuation, especially when there's no latch.

The trackpad was very nice, easily the best I've ever used. It also doesn't look or feel like glass. I can confirm that Apple thought of the same thing that I did in my previous post--a click with one finger generates a left-click, and a tap with two fingers generates a right-click. Awesome. So now Apple has the world's only two-button mouse that doesn't have any buttons at all, and it isn't even a mouse!

(I also tried three- and four-finger taps, but I couldn't see any difference in the behavior of the Finder. I wonder if that's something applications can detect, though.)

Too glossy
As for the new glass-face display: I'm sure it'll be great for watching movies in a dark room. I'm sure it'll be fine for most purposes, if you're in a dark room. And wearing dark clothing, and nothing shiny. But wow, I really don't like to see windows or lights or my clothing reflected in glossy displays, and the only way this new machine's display could be any more glare-prone is if it were mirrored like a highway cop's sunglasses.

I picked the machine up and turned it around in my hands, somewhat constrained by the attached power and Ethernet cables. It felt good in my hands. The surface finish is good-- not slippery, but not rough either. I gave the machine some light tweaking between my hands--both the lid and the base separately, as well as the whole machine with the lid closed--and in all tests, the new machine seemed to offer more torsional rigidity than my old MacBook Pro. So that says the new manufacturing techniques have paid off, at least in that respect.

The bottom covers for the battery/HD and RAM felt very securely attached, not rattly, and the seams were remarkably tight. I hope they stay that way over time, always a difficult thing to achieve with sheet aluminum, which is not the most stable material. (Cars, for example, could be built with even smaller gaps between doors and frames, but makers don't do that because the inevitable shifts over time would then be more conspicuous--and most cars are made out of steel.)

Apple used its snazzy technology for nearly-invisible indicator lights on the sleep indicator; you basically can't see the light unless it's on. (The same technology is used for the "on the air" light next to the Webcam on older MacBook Pros like mine, and it's really almost like magic.) Oddly, however, there's a short slot next to the indicator on the new machine that compromises the clean look Apple was presumably seeking with this design feature. I don't even know what the slot is for! My only guess is that it might have the infrared receiver for the Front Row remote control behind it.

Out of respect for the store, I didn't pop the battery cover off, though I am curious how that latch works. The latch is at one side, but it has to seal tight across a very long edge. That's usually difficult to arrange.

Sharper feel
The edge of the aluminum around the keyboard and palm rests does, indeed, feel sharper than the plastic on the older MacBook Pros. Not physically sharper, but the low friction of the old plastic makes the edge feel smoother because skin is less likely to hang up on it. Skin doesn't slide over the new aluminum edge nearly as easily.

Since the new machine had accumulated quite a crowd within just a few minutes while I examined these elements, I turned to a couple of guys on one side who had arrived shortly after I did, rubbed my palm across the edge of the new MacBook Pro a few times, did the same on the older model next to it, and asked them to do the same. Then I asked "does the new one feel sharper?" Both said yes. But we all also agreed that visually, they appeared to be about the same, so I think the answer is that Apple ought to round over this edge just a bit more.

And with that, I stepped back and let the rest of the crowd fight over the new machine. I didn't see any new MacBooks on that visit (and I couldn't get my iPhone power adapter replaced under the recall; they were out). But seeing the new Pro was enough to justify the visit. I love the looks, but I can't justify buying a new laptop right now. So I'll wait for the next refresh and hope those machines still look this good.

Interesting news from the DemoFall conference held this week in San Diego:

Plastic Logic--a company founded to commercialize electronics built on flexible plastic substrates--demonstrated a prototype e-book reader (not yet named) and announced that it plans to ship this product in the first half of next year. You can read the press release for yourself.

This particular gizmo is very attractive. It uses a large, flexible electronic paper display based on technology from E Ink (the same company that makes the displays for Amazon.com's Kindle and Sony's Reader), but the device overall is remarkably thin and light.

And the whole thing is somewhat flexible, so it won't break if it gets slightly bent in a backpack or briefcase. Flexible doesn't mean invulnerable, but it's a lot better than the brittle glass displays of existing e-book readers.

Check out this video from DEMOfall, in which Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta demonstrates the prototype. I see some minor problems in the prototype's display--some dead lines and odd drawing glitches--but nothing that should interfere with the scheduled launch.

More importantly, even as a prototype, the display's contrast ratio seems to be better than that of the Kindle or Reader, mostly by virtue of the white being whiter--I'd have to make a direct comparison to be sure, though. I also see all of the critical features I want in an e-book reader: good display resolution... Read more

At CES 2008, I talked with several companies, some for work and some for Speeds and Feeds.

Although I saw many interesting products, I'm really looking forward to one product in particular that isn't due to ship until October.

It's the HydroPak fuel-cell power supply from Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies. It produces up to 25 watts of power from replaceable solid fuel cartridges and water. A single refueling can produce about 270 watt-hours of energy through the HydroPak's standard 110V AC power outlet and two auxiliary USB power jacks.

This electricity is expensive-- $20 for a fuel cartridge, putting the cost of a kilowatt-hour at $74 vs. about a dime if you get it from a wall outlet. But as I described in a December post about the much larger, more expensive iGen fuel cell from IdaTech, the price of electricity in an emergency or when you're just out camping can be relatively high and still make good sense.

It's easy to get cheap electricity in the field. Buy a gasoline generator ($300 and up) and some fuel. Pull the starter, and you've got juice. But a generator is loud and smelly, and gasoline is dangerous. Nobody wants to listen to a noisy generator out in the wilderness. Nobody wants to smell one anywhere, and you can't use one indoors.

Also, a generator may produce much more power than you need. There's no such thing as a 25-watt gasoline generator. Even the smallest generators are barely portable. If all you need to run is a radio or a laptop, a generator is overkill.

But fuel cells aren't a good alternative today. I've written about tiny ones like the Medis 24-7 Power Pack (which I don't like because it's too small and much, much too expensive) and large ones like the iGen and the Trulite KH4. But there isn't anything in between--nothing priced like a gasoline generator but capable of producing useful amounts of power.

So that's where the HydroPak comes in. It's $400 for the main unit and $20 for the cartridges. The main unit weighs four pounds; one fuel load consists of a half-pound fuel cartridge and a little over a pint of ordinary water (which needn't be pure; even salt water is OK). The HydroPak can operate indoors; there's no exhaust. It's almost silent.

On one refueling, the HydroPak can recharge a notebook computer several times--maybe five times for a full-size notebook like the MacBook Pro I use, maybe 10 times for a small machine like the Asus Eee PC.

The fuel cartridges can be stored for years. They're safe to transport; Horizon is working on getting all the appropriate transportation safety certifications. You don't have to use the whole fuel cartridge at once after it's been activated.

The cartridges contain the same sodium-borohydride fuel that the Medis and Trulite power supplies use. It seems to be the best option right now, but it isn't perfect. It's offers good energy density, but it's still a corrosive, mildly hazardous chemical. As long as the fuel and the byproducts of the reaction, which are returned to the cartridge, remain securely sealed inside, everything's OK... and that means packaging may be the critical element of all these products. We'll just have to see how it all works out as consumer sales grow.

The other drawback of the HydroPak is the way power is drawn from the unit. That AC power outlet seems convenient, but the unit can only provide 25W of power--50W peak for brief periods--and most things that plug into an AC outlet draw more power than that.

My MacBook Pro has an 85-watt AC adapter, but the 85W figure is for its DC output. It's rated to draw up to 165 watts from the wall--although I think in practice it probably doesn't exceed about 100 watts. Even the AC adapter that came with my Eee PC says it can draw 74 watts of 110V power, though I think it probably really tops out at 40 watts or so. Will that work on the HydroPak? I'm not sure.

The USB power outlets are convenient for cell phones and other low-power devices (up to 2.5 watts each), but you can't charge a laptop or power tools from a USB jack.

It seems to me that what the HydroPak really needs is a high-power DC output--a traditional 12V cigarette-lighter jack or perhaps the Anderson Powerpole, which has become the standard 12V power connector in the amateur-radio field. It would be especially valuable if the HydroPak could charge standard 12V car batteries or smaller gel-cell batteries, because then an AC power inverter could be connected to produce much more than 25 watts of output power for shorter periods of time.

Anyway, I'm sure that Horizon and other fuel-cell providers will figure out what the market wants, and over the next few years we'll probably see a great variety of fuel-cell power supplies. But I think we'll be able to say that 2008 was the year that fuel cells first became true consumer products, and Horizon may be the first to get there.

I'm a little late to the party with this unboxing of my new OLPC XO-1 laptop, but the machine arrived while I was out of town visiting my family for Christmas. In fact, there's a story there.

Before I left, I started hearing that people were receiving their XO-1's, and I realized that if mine didn't show up before I left, it would almost certainly arrive while I was gone. The OLPC people sent out no shipment notifications and didn't reply to several emails, so I had no way to delay the shipment or contact the carrier.

I left a note on my front doorstep: "PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE PACKAGES HERE. HOLD FOR PICKUP. THANKS."

But on Dec. 21, a FedEx delivery person left the XO-1 box right next to the note, and they were both still there six days later when I got home. All that time, the package was in clear view of the street. Never mind New York-- I love Cupertino.

If you get an XO-1, don't throw away the box! You'll need it for the free year of Internet access through T-Mobile WiFi hot spots. The box has the reference number for account activation.

In keeping with the low-cost nature of the XO-1, its packaging is minimal but adequate.

The XO-1 comes with no manual, just two sheets of paper: one showing the hardware and software features of the unit plus some warning icons, and one with a thank-you note from OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte.

There's also no warranty booklet. The XO-1 comes with a 30-day limited warranty, but that's it, and it isn't written down anywhere.

I was somewhat surprised-- and pleased-- to see that OLPC provided a toll-free support phone number. As I'll describe in my forthcoming review, that might prove to be an expensive decision; the XO-1 is not yet very well documented, and some aspects of its operation are difficult to understand.

Of course, there's some XO-1 documentation online. Negroponte's letter points buyers to the laptopgiving.com website, which in turn points to the main laptop.org site, and from there a diligent search will reveal more detailed information on the OLPC Wiki.

But many aspects of laptop operation that are familiar to Windows, Mac, or Linux users aren't documented anywhere, as far as I can tell, probably because they aren't even supported. I can't find any way to control power-management features, for example.

Bottom line: the OLPC developers have a lot of work to do. These early systems don't even qualify as beta-test devices; they're just an alpha release, not feature-complete.

But they do work, and I still believe the XO-1's primitive state of development could actually be a positive benefit for bright children, who will be challenged to learn about these machines in ways they'd never have to do with a mainstream laptop PC.

The XO-1's limited hardware budget isn't wasted on unnecessary doo-dads. It arrives with the bare minimum of accessories: a battery and an AC adapter.

Both of these items are in keeping with the low-power design of the XO-1. Most laptops today come with larger batteries, often in the 50 watt-hour range; the XO-1's battery provides only 40% as much capacity. The AC adapters for full-size notebook PCs usually provide over 65W of power; this one is about a quarter as powerful.

But these are advantages, not disadvantages. A low-power laptop is like a lightweight car. A lighter car can use a smaller engine, brakes, and suspension without compromising performance. If the car gets heavier, the other components have to bulk up too. Similarly, reducing a laptop's power consumption saves weight in the machine itself and in its battery and power adapter.

You can see here that the whole surface of the XO-1's hard plastic case is covered by a pattern of nubbly dots that make it easier to grip without making it any more difficult to clean-- a wise decision by the developers. There's also a bit of whimsy around the handle section, where the openings are ringed by little "X" shapes that form the XO-1 logo.

Since the hard plastic would still be too slippery on a desk, the XO-1 has molded-in feet made of some non-skid rubbery material. They aren't very tall; since the XO-1 consumes so little power, there's no need to create airspace under the case.

My XO-1 came with a nice blue/green logo color combination. I don't know how many combinations there are, but I gather it's a large number, reducing the odds that two students in the same class will have the same colors.

The XO-1's ears contain 2.4 GHz antennas shared between the WiFi and proprietary mesh networks. They're also the locks that hold the machine closed. They engage with spring-loaded pins so the top will snap closed even if the ears are stowed first.

There aren't a lot of I/O options on the XO-1, just the basic requirements. The microphone jack can also be used as a generic analog input; the XO-1 comes with an application that works like a simple oscilloscope. Neat.

(Actually, applications are called "activities" on the XO-1. Sometimes it seems like the developers are thinking too differently.)

Another clever design feature on the other side of the unit: two USB jacks are positioned at different angles to make it more likely that awkwardly-shaped USB devices can be accommodated.

The XO-1's display is about what I expected. Resolution is good, but colors aren't as vibrant as on traditional LCDs. As I should have predicted, color saturation is related to the ratio of backlighting to ambient light. Outdoors or under a strong indoor light, colors are very washed out even with the backlight cranked up all the way. In sunlight, color disappears entirely, and you might as well turn off the backlight since it doesn't help.

The LCD viewing angle, unfortunately, is very poor. At little as 30 degrees off-axis, contrast begins to drop sharply. Two children sitting side-by-side would have trouble viewing the screen together. For ebook reading, the XO-1's display can't match those of the Sony PRS-505 Reader and the Amazon Kindle.

Not shown here is the Secure Digital (SD-card) slot, which is under the lower edge of the right side of the display unit. The positioning helps protect the slot, but there's no way to get clear access to it, which may limit the range of SD-card peripherals that can be used with the XO-1. I'm not sure this was so clever.

To me, the low point of the XO-1's physical design is the keyboard. The synthetic rubber membrane is very thin and the keyswitches are very soft so there's almost no tactile feedback. Hitting a key feels almost the same as missing one.

Perhaps children's fingertips are sensitive enough to get the feedback they need for good touch-typing. But even if that's true, I fear this keyboard may be too fragile.

The keys are also smaller than necessary, even given the focus on small hands. The keyboard is 15 keys wide, with a double-wide Enter key plus tab, [, and ] keys on the QWERTY row. Although the OLPC developers took a fresh look at pretty much everything else, they slavishly imitated the high key counts of full-size notebooks to their detriment.

Since the XO-1 has multiple modifier keys-- shift, control, alt, fn, "hand", and alt-graph keys-- it would have been better to move more of the punctuation symbols to letter keys, reducing the key count and allowing the keys themselves to be slightly larger, making typing easier.

The keyboard is printed with many international characters, but it isn't as cluttered as it could be. Only one key has four different symbols on it (semicolon, colon, and underlined lower-case a and o characters); most have three, and some have two. G, K, L, Z, X, V, and B are left alone. Oddly, there's a whole extra key just for the "times" and "divide" symbols.

There are also many extra keys for features unique to the XO-1's "Sugar" user interface, which is a good thing. Sugar relies too much on tricks like hot corners and tabs, disappearing borders and drawers, and other features that require a lot of careful cursor motion. Unfortunately, the XO-1's touchpad doesn't operate very smoothly or accurately, at least for me, and there's no apparent way to control its sensitivity or the speed of cursor motion.

Because I was somewhat critical of OLPC in earlier blog posts (here and here) for making strong promises about battery life that weren't supported by the early prototype hardware, the first thing I did with the new machine after charging it for a few hours was to run a couple of simple battery-life benchmark tests.

In the first test, I connected the XO-1 to my home WiFi network (which required falling back from WPA security to the relatively insecure WEP standard), cranked the backlight up to maximum, and opened my favorite webcam page: Ben Lovejoy's auto-refreshing feed for the camera at the public entrance to the Nürburgring racetrack in Germany.

The page didn't load reliably-- sometimes the WiFi connection would drop, provoking Server Not Found errors-- but I kept an eye on it and got it back on track each time it derailed. This wasn't the "heavy use" that OLPC's Walter Bender was describing in his comments on 60 Minutes last May, but at least it was something.

The result? The XO-1 ran for just 45 seconds short of four hours. Not so great.

Well, it's a prototype, and OLPC vice-president Jim Gettys said that "heavy use" could be construed to cover uses as lightweight as reading an ebook outdoors with the backlight off. So I charged the machine overnight and, this morning, from a clean reboot, I started an ebook-reading test with the backlight off. I opened a PDF provided with the XO-1 and pushed the page-down button once every 20 minutes to keep the display from turning off entirely. The machine ran for 4 hours and 59 minutes. (I swear these are the actual numbers.) That's a long way from Bender's promise of "10 to 12 hours... with heavy use."

But still, it's a prototype, and as Gettys explained, there are many opportunities for further power reductions. Similarly, there will undoubtedly be other improvements over time. We'll see.

I got my Kindle ebook reader from Amazon yesterday. It was very attractively packaged, and I've been looking for an excuse to do a traditional unboxing blog post, so here we go.

[Later update: my Kindle review is online now.]

When I opened the outer box the Kindle was shipped in, I found a second folded-cardboard sleeve inside protecting the product.

Inside that was the packaging for the product itself, a book-like box held shut by an elastic band around a post recessed into the "cover". This box would look reasonably attractive on a bookshelf, helping to reinforce Kindle's place in one's library.

... Read more