Made By Monkeys

It doesn't take an engineering degree to figure out why a USB key needs a slim profile. To wit, everything from PEZ dispensers to Swiss Army Knives have been employed as casings for the portable memory devices.

That's why this new USB memory key/pendant due out from Active Crystals in August simply screams impracticality. Encrusted with Swarovski crystals, it's an eye-catching little thing. Just like a magpie, I'm attracted to pretty, glittery objects. And it has an ample 1GB of memory.

But it's fat. And when you need to plug in your keyboard, mouse, Skype phone, camera, iPod and all the other gizmos, the thought of using what amounts to a double-wide device just seems profligate. Give me function over form any day.

This burned-out hulk of a badly designed tractor (left), which caught fire when trapped grass near the hot muffler ignited (muffler detail,right) has got engineer Mike Cosgrove seriously thinking about getting a goat!

Writes Mike: I bought a Sears 22-HP 48-inch cut garden tractor when I moved to acreage. One day when the grass was pretty long, I cut it , then went back over the clippings to do some extra mulching. There was some old, dried thatch mixed in with the clippings. Suddenly I felt some heat on my right foot. Looking down, I noted some burning grass stuck between the muffler, the foot peg for my right foot, and the steering gear for the front wheels. The culprit? The design sucked!

Retired Engineer Alan Falk spends lots of time in his workshop. Recently, he spent some unwelcome time in the ER:

"Earlier this year I learned that my Ryobi bench grinder has an awful design flaw: The shields on the grinding wheels have too wide of a gap between the "shield" and the wheel - wide enough to suck your finger in by friction when the wheel is spinning. It happened to me and cut a nice wedge out of my fingertip, like the "cross-sectional diagrams" of planets and stars you might see in an issue of Astronomy Magazine. My finger healed completely, but Ryobi has not responded to my gentle prods to redesign the covers. Basically, the outer protective covers should provide clearance at the center [axle] for the nuts and washers that hold the wheels onto the shaft and after that, should be as close as practical (maybe 0.25 inch max) to the side surface of the grinding wheels. Anyone who designs it any other way has had too much design school and apparently ZERO time in the workshop."

News this week of the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge got us thinking about famous engineering screw-ups:

"The original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, dubbed Galloping Gertie, was the world's third-longest suspension bridge when it opened on July 1, 1940. It collapsed in a windstorm about four months later, becoming famous as "the most dramatic failure in bridge engineering history."

Most engineers are familar with this notorious bridge incident, having learned about it in a basic physics course. See some great video here.

Coming up with ten examples of engineering-gone-wrong was a challenge, as the culprit of so many calamities is not bad engineering (safety factors at work here), but rather a motley assortment of organizational incompetence, exaggerated marketing claims, and operator error and misuse.

Here are our picks, in no particular order:

1. Tacoma Narrows Bridge
2. Big Dig Tunnel (Boston, MA)
3. Ford Pinto
4. Bridgestone/Firestone Tires
5. Space Shuttle Challenger
6. London Millenium Footbridge
7. Aloha Airlines Flight 243
8. Hyatt Regency Walkway (Kansas City)
9.Maytag Front-Load Washing Machine
10.Denver Airport Baggage Handling System

And just for fun, here's a photo of the mold problem implicated in the Maytag recall, thanks to a frustrated former Maytag customer, Thomas F. McLoughlin (who as a VP of Engineering knows something about good product design!).

Ah, the joys of building a new home!

Jon Titus moved into his new residence a year ago, and reports that his brand new GE dishwasher still has some rather irksome problems:

"We recently purchased and had installed a GE dishwasher, model GLD6500L00CC. In the photo you can see the curved side of the dishwasher tub. which is plastic, so it is quite flexible and easily goes out of shape. The edge of the cabinet is plumb. The local GE serviceman told me the bowing was most likely because the dishwasher is installed on a tile floor. Like GE NEVER did that before. Either we got a defective dishwasher or the original installers screwed it up. Oh, and after we fill the dishwasher, the door doesn't close unless we jam it in place. The dish racks already shows signs of rust and the upper rack jams when we try to slide it back into the dishwasher. The latter problem may arise from the cockeyed installation. We'll eventually buy a good dishwasher with a metal tub and frame. This one is junk. I'll call GE again and again until they get it right."

Today is a happy day for engineers everywhere. Well at least for those of us of a certain vintage.

HP is introducing a retro model of its first hand-held scientific calculator, the HP-35, to mark the 35th anniversary of HP Labs and the calculator's introduction.

Least I date myself too terribly, let me point out that my first calculator was a later model (though admittedly not a whole lot later) -- the Hewlett Packard 41C. It served me well through engineering school. And I kept on using it even after going to work at HP rival Texas Instruments—in spite of a persistent story (I was never sure whether the tale was apocryphal or not) about an engineering manager who so loathed HP products that when he caught a newly hired engineer using an HP, he would take it and smash it to smithereens.

The introduction of a new calculator is significant because a few years back speculation was rampant on the Internet that HP was about to exit the calculator business, causing many hard-core fans of Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) to fall into a deep depression. Yours truly included. It's just so cool when someone from marketing asks to borrow your calculator at a meeting.

Of course, whether the handheld calculator will follow its predecessor, the slide rule, into engineering-tool extinction is debatable: Spreadsheet applications and PDAs offer most of the basic calculator functions. calculator emulators are pervasive, and math analysis software offers even more functionality, eliminating the need for a handheld calculator altogether in many situations. Maybe that's why the response to an enthusiastic comment about HP calculators on an Internet discussion group was simply, "What are they?"

Data can be entered into the new HP-35 using RPN or, for woosies, conventional algebraic methods.

So better hurry and get one now -- at 2 ENTER 15 X 2 X dollars, that's just 12 ENTER 3 X 10 X 20 - dollars less than the original version!

A new study released last week by two Canadian researchers reveals that design flaws are responsible for 75% of all toy recalls, and that this percentage has remained consistent since 1988.

The authors of the study say these design problems potentially can be avoided in the future by improving organizational communication and learning. They plan to investigate how organizations can more effectively learn from their own and other’s mistakes and capture and exploit that knowledge.

But the study also raises troubling questions about the diligence of the engineering and design effort, and whether the beleaguered engineering community is being called upon to do too much with too few resources.

In a study last year by Design News, 70% of the design engineers surveyed reported that they are being called upon to take on an ever-increasing amount of tasks and responsibilities. Over 50% said they were involved in more engineering disciplines than two years ago and expect to be involved in even more in the next two years.

The curse of bad instructions struck again in the booklet that accompanies a shelf unit Jon Titus bought from IKEA.

The original instructions for Step 1 show how to attach two brackets and eight screws and dowel pins to the top, bottom, and sides of the shelf. But, if you're not mechanically inclined, it's easy to miss where the items go. Jon's marked-up instructions, below, explicitly show where the pieces go. The brackets (A) look fairly obvious, but someone with poor vision might miss where to put the other parts, B and C.

Things get even sillier, as underscored in another cartoon from the instructions:

Now here's waste of some good bubbly! Robert Cross bought this Palmolive hand wash in Tesco recently. He points out that it's a new, bigger pack, shame the pick up tube is not longer!

Asparagus isn't my favorite vegetable, but I like the analogy Rene Penning de Vries, CTO of NXP makes in an interview with my colleague David Manners in which he describes how systems design has a desperate need to become more simplified:

“Systems have become very complex. In terms of the architectural challenge it is phenomenal”, says Rene Penning de Vries, CTO of NXP, “there’s a
tendency, from the old days, to have solutions that are spaghetti-like - where everything is working with each other. We need more to go to solutions that are more asparagus-like -- from absolutely inter-tangled, to weakly-cobbled systems.”

EDN Editor Margery Conner brought the Solar Powered Kayak, helpfully outfitted with outriggers, to our attention as a candidate for most ludicrous green marketing claims. Or , you could jjust leave it at most ludicrous. She writes in her Powersource blog:

They say money can't buy happiness, but even a little more of the green stuff would make most engineers a bit more cheerful -- that is if the results of sister pub EDN's 2007 global engineering salary survey are any indication. (Note - you'll need to register to view the full report.)

People I know who have an iPhone, especially those who've owned a Blackberry, say its email capability is klutzy.

No, engineers did not screw up. Rather, it's blamed on a feature of the current US patent system that allows patent holders and "trolls" (people who buy zillions of patents on speculation) to sue for huge damages against possible infringers. According to the NYT article, "Two Views of Innovation, Colliding in Washington":

"...although the Apple iPhone has many superior features, its email function is in most cases clunky when compared with the earlier R.I.M. BlackBerry. Industry executives say that's because Apple has been forced to tiptoe around the patents held by NTP...although the patents have been largely invalidated by the UPSO, there are still active lawsuits NTP has brought..."

  EETimes reports the real reason behind the disastrous, $1B-dollar Xbox 360 recall last year. Unfortunately, it's all an all too familiar tune these days with unrelenting pressure on design engineers to cut costs and speed design cycle.

Writes editor Junko Yoshido in "The Truth About Last Year's Xbox 360 Recall": cut costs and speed design cycles:

"The Xbox 360 recall a year ago happened because "Microsoft wanted to avoid an ASIC vendor," said Lewis [research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner]. "Microsoft designed the graphic chip on its own, cut a traditional ASIC vendor out of the process and went straight to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd., he explained. "

David Mery sent in this photo of a very original and peculiar staircaes in a Paris flat that he says is the first he 's encountered that requires that you off start on the correct foot! .

"At some point in time, someone decided to connect two flats partly above each other. The architect/staircase engineer (is there such a job?) tasked with this job had to fit a staircase in a very small space going from behind a door on a floor to a wall on the floor above. Not enough space for the common solution of the spiral staircase. The solution: a staircase where each step is cut for only one foot. It works in that it gets you between the floors. However, one doesn't feel particularly safe as if you were to miss one step, you'd end up missing two."

Jon Titus sent us this photo of a staircase to nowhere, apparently. The disappearing bannister is a particularly nice touch!

In the real-life engineering who-dunnit The Case of the Tippy Hippie, forensic engineer Myron Boyajian investigates an accident at a home improvement center involving an out-of-control trolley, implicating a high C.G. in the process.

His case, chronicled in Design News, led to design changes in those flat-bottomed trollies with rails in the U.S. 

This is rocket science.

A former NASA engineer who hopes to develop a low-cost technology for space travel suffered a setback this weekend in his design efforts. Reports the Associated Press:

"Jim Akkerman was working on a spacecraft his firm is developing when his rocket fuel exploded. No one was injured and no property was damaged at the accident in Hitchcock, located about 40 miles southeast of Houston.

"It's just an experiment that went bad," police Chief Glenn Manis told the Galveston County Daily News.

Too much methane-oxygen fuel mixture accumulated in the rocket engine when the engine wouldn't fire, causing the explosion, Manis said."

As shown in the drawing above, Akkerman's concept is for a rocket that launches vertically from water. Clearly a bit more work is needed!

Writes Paulo from Italy: