Joy. After months of delays and unexpected problems, we’re finally building Cubelets. In the photo above, Brandon is snapping circuit boards into the plastic casings and testing each face. It’s surreal watching finished Cubelets come off our assembly line — I almost can’t believe it’s really happening. If you’ve pre-ordered a Cubelets Standard Kit, we’ll ship you your Cubelets on June 17, 2011. Thanks for sticking with us! If you’d like to get in on our next manufacturing run of Cubelets, modrobotics.com will be open again for pre-ordering on June 1.

It’s been a lot of fun watching submissions come in for our Cubelets Packaging Design Competition. We received 12 entries, most via email, although a couple of the submissions were physical, and one was a video entry. Sadly, no interpretive dance entries. We had a great time judging and discussing the relative merits of the different approaches and styles.

I’m happy to announce that we picked Helle Schou Pedersen’s design (above) as the winner. It’s a simple design — a cardboard box with labeling and some cutouts — but it is elegant, sustainable, robust, and inexpensive to produce. Helle sent her entry from Denmark and she’s received a prize of US$1000 and a Standard Kit of Cubelets.

Second place goes to Liam Ward, whose design (above) uses a molded paper pulp inner box with a printed paper sleeve. Molds like this can be made from recycled material, although we haven’t found a supplier that’s interested in making any less than 20,000 boxes of one type. Liam’s design might not be easy to use in practice as the strong magnets would click the Cubelets together, preventing them from sitting nicely in their little holes, but the dividers could easily be removed to allow a solid 20 Cubelet “brick” to nest in the paper pulp. Liam sent his entry from the UK and receives a Cubelets Standard Kit. Here are some photos of a few more outstanding designs. Thanks for participating!

We’ve had our first set of injection molded Cubelets in the office for a number of weeks now. We’ve been putting them through their paces in an attempt to identify and rectify any issues in the design or hardware of Cubelets. In an attempt to simulate the regular use and abuse of our product we have performed numerous tests on the blocks. One such test is impact testing of Cubelets. Government standards require that we do impact testing from a specified height onto a highly specified surface. We must drop our product from 36 inches onto â…› inch type IV vinyl tile (the type you would typically find in schools). I set up a nice drop testing studio in our stairwell here at Modular Robotics with the specified tile and some nice lighting. We performed 4 successive drops of our blocks, each time checking for damage to the cube. After each drop of the block we ensured that no sharp points or broken magnets were created during the impact. We also tested the electrical and data connection of the six faces of the block after the testing. These impacts had no adverse effects on the block’s performance. We were pleased to show our expectations of Cubelets to be able to withstand this type of fall. Below is a set of images from one of the drop test videos taken during the testing. We continue to do testing on different aspects of Cubelets including impact tests on our final Battery block design. Keep checking back as we will keep you up to date as we test different blocks in different ways such as fatigue or strength tests.

We had a little party Thursday afternoon for our local Boulder friends. Happily for us, some brought kids. Amidst a crowded hubbub of geeky grownups Elliott Dobbs (he’s six, with one more month in kindergarten) and Arthur Correll (he’s five and a half) sat there building robots! Right now we have only one Cubelets kit–the all-black engineering prototype that’s in our video–so they had to share, but that worked fine. At first they just snapped blocks together randomly to see what would happen. But pretty soon they began to understand the different functions of each Cubelet and the gradient dataflow model that makes the robots go. With single-minded focus on building robots they worked quietly for over an hour and a half (ignoring the Lego Mindstorms robot and other toys on the table next to them). And for me that was the best part of the party–to see young kids playing with Cubelets entirely entranced.

We’ve been delaying the date that we think we’re going to ship our first Cubelets kits for months now, and it’s driving us crazy. It’s annoying other people as well, and I’m sorry for that. I studied architecture in college, but have worked mostly on software projects since then. While software isn’t always easy, it can certainly be fast. Especially now that much software is internet-based, programmers can easily iterate, fix problems, and release new versions quickly. Most architecture projects are the opposite: five years from idea to final construction isn’t out of the ordinary. Although I originally had a thought that Cubelets manufacturing could be agile and more like software production, it’s clearly more like an architecture project, and in fact it’s been about five years since we started. We received an enormous box full of thousands of tiny magnets yesterday, and they were all about 0.2mm too long. This seems like a tiny amount, but since our magnets are cast into the plastic Cubelet shells, magnets that are too long prevent the injection mold from fully closing and can also scratch the expensive mold badly. These custom magnets came after working with the supplier for three months to get the design just perfect. We’ll have to either shave down every magnet and re-plate it, or make a new batch which takes 2 weeks. It’s the little problems like this that multiply for Modular Robotics. There are 300 different parts in each Cubelet kit, many of them custom, from almost 100 different suppliers. And since assembly happens in sequential steps, each problem holds up the process. We’ve already sorted out problems like wheels that were too small, metal parts with lead in them, faulty LEDs, and spontaneously discontinued electronic parts. I never even imagined that something like an earthquake in Japan would influence our production. Although we’re successfully solving each new problem as it comes up, we’re going slower than we hoped. We’ve finished building circuit boards for the first 100 Cubelets kits and the software is tested and ready. When we have all of our custom-made parts in hand and can begin mechanical assembly, I’ll be able to update this post with a revised shipping date. Meanwhile, thanks for joining us on this exciting little journey.

Recently, I was having a hard time deciding what to do about packaging for our first small production runs of Cubelets. I could only see two options, and both were bad. The dilemma involved either hiring a firm to design the packaging (at a cost we couldn’t afford) or doing it ourselves (which we are not particularly good at). Mark came up with the idea of holding a competition. Designers would submit entries and we would pick a winner, rewarding the designer with cash, Cubelets, and instant fame. A perfect third solution. Later, in conversation, somebody mentioned that we were crowdsourcing our packaging design and I feel obligated to clarify. In my mind, crowdsourcing relies on the wisdom of the crowd itself, the power of collective opinion, even democracy. Crowdsourcing implies that we would use whatever packaging design that the crowd wants, which we are emphatically not doing. We are soliciting entries from individuals in the crowd, then we are deciding which one we want to use. Democracy is a great way to structure government. But design shouldn’t be crowdsourced. Are a thousand naive voices better or more valid than one thoughtful designer’s? Probably not. It might seem fiddly to make this distinction between the wisdom of the crowd and the wisdom of a single, particularly good designer in the crowd. But this is something that we’re trying hard to teach with Cubelets. Today in the media, we’re seeing a lot of oversimplification — phrases like “society has a negative view about…” or “America voted for….” I think these are poisonous ways to think about the world. Society has no views: certain individuals do (but others don’t). America didn’t vote: Americans did, and many of them probably voted the other way. By generalizing and refusing to look deeper at the complexities that cause some emergent phenomenon, we’ll never be able to solve (or even understand) the really big problems in the world.

OK, so we’re getting ready to ship our first 100 Cubelets kits, and we’d like to do better than just putting them in a big padded envelope. So, we’re asking for your help in spreading the word about our Packaging Design Competition. Basically: design a package for shipping and storage of our 20-block Standard Cubelets Kit and win a $1000 cash prize and/or a Standard Cubelets Kit. The rules and details are simple enough; the competition ends April 15, 2011.10

Although Cubelets are a little behind schedule for manufacturing, we thought you might enjoy a quick video of our latest prototypes. Production Cubelets will be in fancy colors, these are our top-secret ninja version.

When I was a kid, I remember hearing about an inspired teacher who tried to convey how large a million is by dropping a million kernels of popcorn on his students from some trap doors in the ceiling. I always secretly wished that one of my teachers would do the same thing. Would a million popcorns cover the floor? Would they be a foot deep? In case you’re curious about how much 10,000 tiny circuit boards is, I’m happy to report: they’ll almost bury you! If you’re sitting in a very tiny room. We used a robot to place the components on our earlier run of 2000 circuit boards, but we placed components on the rest of the boards ourselves, with tweezers, here in Boulder, Colorado. We look like a little factory these days. Eric will be in China at the end of January retrieving the plastic pieces we need to assemble complete Cubelets and they’ll be available soon after that!

We made 2000 tiny circuit boards this weekend! We used a giant robot; it’s called a Pick and Place machine because it picks up each tiny electronic component from it’s package and places it perfectly on the circuit board. It’s fast, accurate, and fun to watch (for a little while).

Robot Assembly – Pick and Place

It’s exciting to see Cubelets coming together. Only 10,000 more circuit boards to go!