Ideas

[Duane Johnson]

Two of my brothers (Will and Chris) and I were discussing some future directions for the MakerSlider this evening. There are some exciting things that came from the discussion:

1. Name of the product line: what if we call ourselves "MakerCinema" and change the name of the slider / pocket dolly to "MakerCinema Slider"? We think there's a great synergy taking place between the maker and cinema photography communities--can we capture that in a name? (I just thought of one downside: there exists a "cineslider" product whose creators or lawyers may feel infringed upon... hmm)

2. Composable slider: what if we create a snap-together 2-axis slider? For example, you could create a one-axis slider with one MakerSlider and a 2-axis slider with three MakerSliders: just mount one on top of the other two. The tricky part would be to get the controls working synchronously, but this should be posssible with...

3. Bluetooth or wifi. It would be awesome to control the slider with your phone. The UI possibilities explode with a device like that. It would be so much easier to express things like acceleration, control points (or keyframes) and other concepts on a mobile phone screen.

4. Swivl looks pretty cool. Maybe we can take advantage of it by being "swivl-compatible"?

Duane

[Duane Johnson]

Thanks, Joe! These are great suggestions. I bought the "Cinemaker.us" domain and we're going with the "Cinemaker Pocket Dolly" as a product name.

Have you found any good sources of Bluetooth Low Energy chips that are arduino compatible (and cheap :)? I'm currently looking at this [1] bluetooth chip, however, I don't know if it is "Low Energy" or not (probably not, since it doesn't advertise itself as such).

Thanks,

Duane

[1] http://www.goodluckbuy.com/serial-bluetooth-rf-transceiver-module-rs232-w-backplane-enable-and-state-pin-1.html

On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Joe Walnes <j...@walnes.com> wrote:

1. Name of the product line: what if we call ourselves "MakerCinema" and change the name of the slider / pocket dolly to "MakerCinema Slider"? We think there's a great synergy taking place between the maker and cinema photography communities--can we capture that in a name? (I just thought of one downside: there exists a "cineslider" product whose creators or lawyers may feel infringed upon... hmm)

+1.

Another thing I like about it is that it makes it really obvious what it is quicker. I found MakerSlider was too similar to MakerSlide and I constantly got confused. This way you create a brand that can be shared across multiple products, and reduce confusion.

 

3. Bluetooth or wifi. It would be awesome to control the slider with your phone. The UI possibilities explode with a device like that. It would be so much easier to express things like acceleration, control points (or keyframes) and other concepts on a mobile phone screen.

Yep!

I think your best bet would be to use Bluetooth Low Energy (not Bluetooth Classic).

Reasons:

* Wifi is expensive. And also hard to configure (you need a mechanism for users to select the wireless network, authenticate, etc - it's a real pain).

* Bluetooth Classic is quite expensive. But the biggest problem is that if you ever want to build an iPhone/iPad app, you need to deal with Apple's MFi policies, which requires lawyers, credit checks, custom hardware, and many other costs.

* Bluetooth Low Energy is the new hotness. It's very simple to use, and optimized for low power devices. You don't need to get a special license to get started. Also, much easier to discover from an application making a simpler end user experience (none of this pairing nonsense). Downsides: It's not designed for high bandwidth scenarios, but it should be fine for MakerCinema. Also, it's relatively new, so older phones don't support it.

 

4. Swivl looks pretty cool. Maybe we can take advantage of it by being "swivl-compatible"?

Yep!

[Joe Walnes]

That chip is not Low Energy.

A good bet is this: http://www.bluegiga.com/BLE112_Bluetooth_low_energy_module

Some Arduino resources:

http://kobjects.org/

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php?topic=132487.0

If you need to borrow one, I have a spare BLE-112 Arduino shield that's been sitting around doing nothing - happy to lend it.

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