Sam Schmitz

The world's simplest and cheapest vacuum table

12/25/2016

From my experience, mechanical/hydraulic presses are not practical for the regular DIYer. In addition to being large, heavy, expensive, uneven, and more, they are extremely unsafe. To press longboards I built a large steel press capable of 70 psi (fourty thousand pounds!) but it was very expensive, weighed 500 lbs, and most importantly, the design was verified and assembled by a professional.

Here's the solution for someone who wants to do things like this themselves: Vacuum! There is a huge column of air extending miles above you, weighting down for miles that only doesn't crush you because it's all around you. Remove it from one side, and the whole column comes crashing into the void with a pressure of about 14 psi. That's about 8 THOUSAND pounds for the area I was describing before. A simple vacuum has the potential to safely and effectively replace a metal frame and massive bottle jack, and I've developed a way to do it for about $20.

I designed the part shown below (download here: https://grabcad.com/library/20-vacuum-table-1) to be 3D printed out of...whatever. I use ABS because it's easy to smooth and make airtight. Wipe it down with acetone or clear coat it with some urethane or even just rub Elmer's glue all over it with a brush. Anything you can put on the surface will help keep air in.* The part it difficult to print but once done it is your whole vacuum system. All you need to add is a Vac-U-Vin stopper (get them on amazon for about $8. They're used for sucking the air out of wine bottles) and a zip tie to secure them.

To make the table, use anything that isn't porous. Anything. The best option in my opinion is a sheet of melamine that can be found at any hardware store for a few bucks more than a cheap sheet of plywood. In the lpictures below I just used a shelf! You'll also need vacuum tape and vacuum bagging film, but those can also be easily found on amazon for a very low price.

1. Lay the tape out along the perimeter of what you're going to suck down (add about 5x the height of your thing to the size of the perimeter) and the put the thing in the middle under a few pieces of paper towel. The paper towel should go under the front lip of the part and allows it to "breathe" so that it doesn't just seal by the opening.

2. Take the "pump" and stick it over the tape and add a little bit of tape across the top. Put some paper towels under the thing and under the little edge of the pump. Then just put down the film and press it into the vacuum tape. That's it! You can suck the air out with the little pump and if you sealed the tape firmly enough, it should hold! I usually come back and suck the extra air out every few minutes or so until the glue or epoxy is set.

You can see the results of a few quick tests I did. These all held about this level of vacuum for 10+ minutes! It can be scaled to just about any size, and once you have it together you can slip parts in and out pretty easily. As long as you don't get too much junk on the sealing tape it's possible to use and re-use it dozens if times! It's also possible to make this huge. For larger projects, you can remove the cap of the Vac-u-vin pump and suck most out with a vacuum cleaner or shop vac, and then reattach the top rubber seal and pump the last bit out by hand.

*If you do your own 3D printing, print with about 5 perimeters and bump your extrusion modifier up about 10%. This makes the part look a little messier but really smooshes the layers together and makes it airtight! To get rid of support (if you don't use water soluble stuff) bend a paperclip at an angle and just mash it up, getting as much out as possible. Remember that you don't need to remove all the support material from the inside, you just need to break enough to allow a little bit of airflow.

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The 'Water-Conserving' Planter

10/6/2016

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This past June, my neighbor Barbra waved me over one day and asked if I wanted a tomato plant. She had gotten a few for free, and apparently I somehow looked like the type of person who would be interested in doing so. I was not.

To avoid being rude I took the plant, which turned out to be the smallest most miserable looking twig I had ever seen. It had a few small brown leaves and was barely hanging on. Charlie Brown's Christmas tree looked like it belonged in Rockefeller plaza next to this little guy.

Over the next few weeks, my girlfriend Lexie and I nursed it back to health, and what failed to hold my interest at first now became the highlight of my day. Every day after work we'd immediately rush to see how Captain Jack Sparrow was doing (we had recently watched Pirates of the Caribbean and each read "Pirate Latitudes" by Michael Crichton), and every day it grew just a little bit taller. Soon there were five, ten, then twenty leaves as it shot up in front of our eyes. It became an integral part of our lives, routine, and almost our relationship. Before Lexie left for a trip she joked about how she'd miss Captain Jack more than me, and about how I had better keep it alive. My response was a mix of sarcasm and eye rolling as I joked about how incompetent I'd have to be to do such a thing.

Anyway, two days later, the thing was dead. Not just mostly dead, all dead. Either something had pulled it up by the roots or I am missing some very important pages in my mental book of "caring for living things." Either way, I knew Lexie would be disappointed so I needed a way to at least partially make it up to her.

Lexie's undergraduate degree is in Environmental science, and she is very passionate about water conservation. I had an idea to make a planter that would allow water to flow from one plant to the next; water would be soaked up by as many plant roots as possible before going back on to the ground. I started by brainstorming several sketches as can be seen below.

I should first note a few constraints and goals for this. First of all, I wanted to only use materials I had on hand. Second, I did not care about the actual mechanism or metric of water conservation -the idea of saving water- it's purely symbolic.

I began with the slat of wood you can see in the first picture below. It was a leftover from the CreatiCube prototype. I cut three slots with the table saw and painted them blue. I later sanded this off except for in the slots themselves. For the actual plant holders I had some leftover polycarbonate tubing from a project that wasn't ever going to get used. For the edges as you can see in the bottom middle picture I mixed latex paint with water and Xanthan gum to allow it to give a nice shiny surface- the surface tension from the water allows it to be dripped on like that with a syringe, and the gum keeps it from flattening out when it dries out. (I'm still working on the recipe)

I painted everything with more CreatiCube leftover paint and stained all the wood, coating everything with a water-based clear so it could survive the outdoors. You can see the final result in the picture at the bottom.

Lexie was understandably very disappointed at the fate of Captain Jack Sparrow, but I think the new planter and the idea of growing new plants from scratch helped

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Design U: Developing a design process from s̶c̶r̶a̶t̶c̶h̶ a rock-solid base

12/14/2015

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How we got a student group from 0-60 in just a few months, and where we plan to steer it. | Nov. 2015

In March of last year I was approached by a few classmates asking about starting a student group. I was already the President of another and had no time to offer them, but after their initial pitch I was so excited about the idea that I vowed to make time to make this happen. The idea was simple: to bring students real-world product design experience by connecting them with real-world projects. The group would function like a design firm, with teams of students completing the work and learning about the design process along the way.

Spyhouse

We spent most of the summer in coffee shops, plotting and planning after work to make sure we had some traction when we hit the ground in September. We spent hours and hours researching and in meetings, trying to gather as much information as possible to not screw it up. Though we would be the only product design group to our current knowledge, the list of registered groups showed at least ten defunct ones still listed. We felt like Indiana Jones seeing the remains of the failed treasure hunters before him, but like Mr. Jones we kept on going.

The Rolling Boulder

We hit recruiting pretty hard during the first week of the semester, hoping to get at least 20-25 at our first meeting so we could begin to do a few projects. Apparently we had tripped some kind of switch by starting this group, activating a niche within the community that needed to be filled, because sixty two people showed up for our first meeting. The list of applications we had hoped would get into the 30s by the end of the semester had passed 80 by the beginning of November.

Design U

The most difficult and crucial aspect of starting this group was coming up with a systematic way to tackle projects efficiently and effectively, while also ultimately focusing on being a learning group. In the college of Design at the University of Minnesota there is an excellent product design minor run by Professor Barry Kudrowitz, which is currently being turned into a major. Professor K's teachings revolve around a five step human-centered design process, similar to that of IDEO's and Stanford's d. school. We wanted to emulate this as much as possible to serve as a supplement to students in the college, but our unique formation put us in an interesting position. We weren't a group of experienced designers, we were a group of semi-experienced design students leading other students without much exposure to the process at all. We needed a way to product quality and consistent work while making the process as educational as possible.

The model we developed has so far has been very successful: Lead designers (upperclassmen with plenty of experience and good leadership skills) lead teams of 10-20 Designers (anyone interested) through the design process with the oversight of the executive team (us). This is supplemented by our general body meetings every other week, where we have games, activities, and speakers all designed to familiarize students with the design process and to make the group fun and engaging.

The idea behind the system is that anyone can contribute and learn without necessarily affecting the project outcome, however the opportunity to contribute to the final product is always there. As students develop and grow within the group and within their actual courses, they are able to contribute more and more and have a larger impact on the final outcome.

The Color Wheel

Shown below is our design process developed by our president Ryan Hedblom and I. It is identical to the standard model with the addition of the "Connect" step of the process. The idea behind this step is that unlike many real firms and designers, our students most likely do not have all the tools, resources, or expertise needed to complete the project. It involves reaching out to other students, student groups, faculty, or any other appropriate resources for anything needed to complete the tasks at hand. Unlike a for-profit firm, our group is a non-profit (501.3c) intended primarily for learning so this step also involves making sure all of the students within the project are connected and getting the full experience.

We are still developing this process and learning more every day about what it takes to run the group. We've got some big plans for next semester so keep checking our website for updates.

So what are we working on?

Here are some graphics I made for our website that talk about some of the projects we're working on. We've since added two more (LPRD Liquid-Propelled rocket and Backyard Journey, a startup for getting kids outdoors) but these are the main four we started with.

Check out the hyperloop site that I made (with the help of the Design U team of course). I was also elected by the Hyperloop team to head down to Texas A&M for the hyperloop Design Weekend in January, where I will be presenting with a team of five and answering questions for judges in order to be considered for the next round. I'll probably add something about that later.

Disclaimer: The Hyperloop logo was a collaborative effort by the hyperloop team, and the Mobineo tree was an old iteration from their archives. The Medical logo was also just pulled from google. The rest was done by me.

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One-Legged Bed

10/20/2015

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Designing and building a new bed for the new house | Sept. 2015

On September first this year my friends and I moved into a new house. I could've just kept my old bed of course, but every time we move into a new house I develop some idea of what the room needs to look like, and I never feel comfortable until my space has some semblance of my grand vision. This particular glimpse into what I felt it needed to look like had lights, a USB charger, stairs, and of course a height that sacrificed just about all function for form. The difficult parts here were my money and time budgets: a total of $0.00 and about 3 days.

Inspired

My sister Sophie has two mattresses and a box spring on her bed, and when I got to use her room on a visit back home I loved the height. There was something about the isolation of being up high that felt very appealing. When the floor is a little further away and getting out of bed takes a little more effort, I felt a strange and relaxing disconnection from the rest of the room. Beyond that it's difficult to explain even to myself, but all I knew is I needed a really tall bed.

Uninspired

Anyone over six feet tall who has lived in a college dorm can attest to the fact that being two feet away from the ceiling is miserable. Though a loft sounds like it would fit the height criteria described earlier, there was something awful about having to climb up into a bed. I wanted to be able to jump in to it, or at least walk via a staircase. I decided on a final height of about four feet which is awful for just about every reason except that it felt right. The engineer in me eventually acquiesced to the inefficiency of 'too tall to climb into, too short to be under,' and I decided to just go for it.

The Three Rs

For the frame I reused the base of my old bed frame, bolting two sides into the wall with 5/6" lag bolts. I recycled a 4x4" old fence post found in a dumpster covered in mud and stains (top right picture) but after sanding and painting it turned out pretty nice. The other top pictures show the slats secured with joists about a foot apart, with an extra 8" left for the headboard. It was rock solid, and i̶t̶ ̶f̶e̶l̶t̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ it was part of the frame of the house.

The Four Stairs

I used pre-made stringers from Home Depot for the stairs, secured to the wall with a single lag bolt and supported additionally by two legs made from scrap wood. By lining them up and making both sides at the same time, (middle-left) I didn't have to be too precise to get them level and identical. The actual steps were repurposed from the sides of the old bed. In the end they took me about a half hour to make and around $18.

Big Screen

I built a headboard using the remaining scraps of my old bed and put the LED strips from it behind a piece of white fabric. The fabric diffused the lights well enough to create an ambient glow that resembled a giant TV screen. I used a 12v power supply from an old router to power the LEDs and an old car charger to use as a phone charger at night. To turn it on and off I 3D printed a little switch holder that you can see in the bottom left picture.

Winter Sucks

The lights aren't the kind of soft white lights you'd like to have on before going to bed, but I eventually plan on using them for the mornings. As soon as one of my arduinos isn't being used I'm going to hook them up so that they turn on with my alarm. Here in Minnesota it's dark on winter mornings until well after I need to be up, so hopefully this will mimic natural light well enough to help me get out of bed.

About $30 | 7-8 hours over 4 days | "full" sized mattress | 48" Tall