Book Review—Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy

Eat That Frog! is a pithy business success book that is effective and short. Basic premise: begin each day with the most important and difficult task that will have the greatest impact on your job and life. After that, everything will seem easy in comparison.

"It has been said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.

Your “frog” is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment."

Make an Old-school two-way pager with Arduino

I made a 2-way pager with an Arduino, GSM shield, and LCD shield. I’ve found this idea to be more useful than at first glance—I designed it so it could be used by children in lieu of a real cell phone, or it could be used as an “SOS” button for someone working alone outdoors or even exercising (if it was a bit smaller). And for the last few weeks, this device has been always on in my living room where my wife and I leave silly messages for each other.

Summary: This project sends and receives text (SMS) messages via an arduino with cellular modem built into a small enclosure with an LCD display and simple control buttons. Full details of the design and build are on Hackster.io.

Could also be called "Most expensive pager made in 2016 ever."

Update: People seem to like this project! It has over 10,000 views, and was even featured on Hackster’s Handpicked Projects of the Week.

How to make a cellular-connected garden monitor

Check out this project I made to monitor the soil moisture level of my remote garden plot. Since the garden has no power or internet available, it uses a cellular data connection to send info back to a cloud service, and then that data gets passed to another cloud service for plotting. A great learning experience!

I posted all the details on Hackster.io, a community for hardware makers with lots of interesting projects:

Book Review—The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

The Lean Startup is an influential business book by Eric Ries that seemed to really make waves through the software industry and beyond. The premise, reduced to just one sentence: build a “minimum viable product” to get early feedback from customers to avoid the risk of a long development process that results in a polished product that no one actually wants. Being somewhat familiar with the concepts of lean manufacturing, I thought I would see if some of the ideas could be applied to physical product development.

Book Review—Zero to One by Peter Thiel

In Zero to One, author Peter Thiel makes the case for unorthodox thinking in order to build the future purposefully by creating companies so good they can effectively reap the benefits of a monopoly for a long period of time, potentially decades. He argues that the path to making money long-term is to make a product at least 10x better than the so-called competition and not get trapped in the traditional thinking of making incremental advances on existing products. The all-electric Tesla Roadster, for example, was in a league of its own when it launched and created much better opportunities for Tesla than if they had made something to compete with the Honda Civic.

How to make a vertical laptop stand from laser-cut acrylic

When my wife is working from home, she likes to sit at a proper desk with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse instead of hunching over her laptop. To make it easy, I set up an "umbilical cord" of power, USB, and display connection to plug in and off she goes. To free up room on her desk she lays her 13" Macbook Air on the floor which is always kind of awkward. To resolve this, I thought a space-saving vertical laptop stand could help, much like one of these made by Twelve South or Rain Design.

But it's no fun to buy one; let's design and build one from scratch out of laser-cut acrylic!

The two copies of the laptop stand I cut out of acrylic

Mini Book Review—Making Things Move by Dustyn Roberts

Making Things Move by Dustyn Roberts is well described by its subtitle "DIY Mechanisms for Inventors, Hobbyists, and Artists". I picked it up at the library to see if there were any fun new pieces or tricks I could learn from as an engineer. Highlights included the parts about the internal workings of stepper motors and a trick on how to drill a hole in the center of a shaft without a lathe. So while there were some cool new tidbits, it was mostly just fun to see all these topics in one place and easily approachable for new people.

Notable covered topics:

• The six simple machines
• Material types, properties, and tolerances
• Fastening and joining
• Forces, torque, power, work, energy sources
• Intro to hobby motors and servos and their control
• Bearings, gears, screws, springs, cams, linkages, and motion conversion
• Lots of example projects bringing these concepts together

For a non-engineer getting into making projects with electronics or motors, this would be a great resource I would recommend. If you are already an engineer with some making experience, this book would be just for fun.