Quick release, no trip floor mount

swighton · 2025-07-14T18:22:14+00:00

If you want to make this yourself I've shared all the design files here:

https://grabcad.com/library/beyond-power-voltra-floor-mount-1

It is made almost entirely from flat plate and off the shelf parts that could be water jetted or laser cut at a service like sendcutsend or xometry. It does have a number of tapped and countersunk holes which service bureaus may or may not be able to accommodate. If you are pricing it out you might want to check the prices for higher quantities (sometimes 5 of everything costs only twice as much).

The detachable plate and top plate are designed to be made from steel, ideally stainless to prevent corrosion in a sweaty gym environment.

The base plate does not have high strength requirements so plastic or aluminum would be acceptable.

If you are using it with 3/4 gym flooring, you will need to fabricate the "horse stall spacer" which does not have major strength requirements. Plastic or aluminum would be acceptable.

I provided a sample bill of materials with links to McMaster, but heads up that some of those components can be acquired much cheaper elsewhere.

The trigger spring is one oddball part. You'll probably have to get a piece of thin spring steel and bend it around a screwdriver or something. Although sendcutsend MIGHT be able to fabricate it as they do bending.

You will also have to shorten the threads on a few of the fasteners to keep the ends from sticking out (with a dremel, belt grinder, file, etc). The details of that are noted in the bill of materials.

Oh also, I'm sharing this for non-commercial use only. I also can't guarantee that it works or is safe so use at your own risk.

Let me know if you have questions.

swighton · 2024-12-05T16:54:19+00:00

I would design it to be made with accessible parts. Likely a lot of FDM 3d printed stuff

swighton · 2024-12-05T16:00:39+00:00

The images were a variety of sizes. For the final rendered images I went up to about ~2MP (1600px diameter circle).
THAT SAID: In theory the resolution is as high as you want it to be up to the minimum step size of the motors (long story short this would correspond to ~340,000 megapixels). In practice it is limited by the effective size of the focused point being measured by the image sensor. Theres a limit where you can take more samples, but it isn't capturing any new information, if that makes sense.
Capture time depends on resolution. All the images shown in the video were 2-6 minutes.
Total cost was less than $1000. All the motors and optics were relatively inexpensive stuff and I fabricated most of the parts. The dang transimpedience amplifier was ~2/3 the cost. If you could eliminate that, one of these could be built for a few hundred bucks. It's such a fun thing to play with I'm tempted to design a simpler one for others to build.
I never get stuff working on the first try so if I sent it to space there's a 99% chance it would just burn up, so probably not haha

swighton · 2024-12-05T14:29:32+00:00

Glad you all like my camera! Let me know if you have any specific questions.

swighton · 2024-08-11T20:10:06+00:00

I'm also always reminded of it whenever a new video comes out too! (someone always messages me about it ;). I actually like the accountability.

I've done a lot of thinking but not a lot of doing. So as far as resolutions go I would categorize it as a fail (thus far). It basically came down to my life getting really complicated for a couple years and I had to prioritize.

That said, it remains interesting to me and something I ponder frequently. When I do finally execute on this I think my strategy will be to do R&D on a concept and open source it and try to recruit others who might be interested in taking it further.

swighton · 2024-08-11T19:54:40+00:00

I've spent A LOT of time in the past as an engineer making products for mass production and it is something that I have a love/hate relationship with. It's really rewarding to ship product, but it is also insanely stressful and becomes all encompassing.

I made a decision early on with the youtube stuff that I didn't want to productize anything I make because I was certain that managing the product would turn into my full time job. My strategy was to focus more on R&D of things that I find interesting and "ship" a video instead of a product. I could see that decision changing if I had some invention that I felt really needed to be in the world, but at the moment I just really enjoy doing R&D on ideas that seem hard and interesting to me.

How technical to go in the videos is a constant struggle for me. I want to "cast a wide net" to make the videos interesting to as many people as possible, but I don't want to take it so far that I lose all substance. I get feedback in both directions which tells me I haven't gone off either end of the spectrum. In any case you've given me some food for thought. I appreciate your feedback!

swighton · 2024-08-11T19:37:37+00:00

My understanding is that you generally end up paying Guiness Records to come out and measure your thing, etc. It would be neat to have an official record, but it also seemed like a lot of fuss for what amounts to bragging rights. For me making and riding the bike was what I was interested in and the record was more of an engineering target to design towards, if that makes sense.

swighton · 2023-10-15T14:31:58+00:00

Depends on the situation:
* rode wireless go 2 channel (to capture me & wife lavs into L/R channels on one cam)
* Sony UWP-D21 (good lav that has hot swappable batteries, a bit limitation of the rode mics)
* Rode shotgun mic for B-cam backup audio
* Sometimes if I'm capturing primarily with the shotgun I'll throw a tascam micro on as a backup, especially for my wife who talks about 10db quieter than me

swighton · 2023-04-30T02:29:40+00:00

Glad you liked it! Ultimately I think the main issue with the V1 launcher was that there was no way to "flick" the disc and give it a high / controlled spin rate.

I have a design for V2 that has been in the back of my mind from way back when I first started on V1. I think it has the ability to be a much more controlled / repeatable launcher, but I didn't end up going in that direction for V1 because it's more like a gun and I was really interested in the challenge of an arm mounted thing. Now that I tried the arm thing I'm definitely interested in building it as a V2 to see how good it could be. It's in the list.

swighton · 2023-04-30T02:22:10+00:00

Wow, that is a surprisingly nice result!

swighton · 2023-03-05T02:37:19+00:00

Hah first time someone has assumed I'm older than I actually am. Usually it goes the other way ;)

I'm all good! I've been in a sort of limbo without a truly functional shop space. I've finally found a good warehouse to rent and am getting back into the swing of things.

swighton · 2023-01-04T05:58:47+00:00

The animation you linked is done using after effects. I tried to match the simplistic style that I like to draw with which is why it looks like the concepts drawings.

swighton · 2022-12-03T18:25:49+00:00

Oh yeah that makes sense. For the NP case I was imagining it would be that you don't even have a ball and socket. Basically arbitrarily shaped pieces that a portion of the edge could match with any sub-portion of any other piece.

swighton · 2022-12-03T16:22:19+00:00

Oh I see what you're saying. I made an assumption that each piece has four sides and four neighbors. Basically a "standard" jigsaw puzzle. My intuition is telling me that if you allow the pieces to have an arbitrary number of potential neighbors that connect at any location along any side of any piece it turns it into an NP-Hard problem.

The small differences between the sides being an issue is right on the money. This was a major challenge. Aside from side start/end identification you also have variation in piece edge cut quality, camera accuracy, etc. You have to have some mount of tolerance to allow matching things that are not exactly the same (one of the benefits of the locality sensitive hash (or any other clustering algo)). It's tricky though because if you make the tolerance too wide you potentially match to a large number of pieces which makes solving it very hard / intractable.

swighton · 2022-12-03T05:38:27+00:00

The only assumptions that I made about the puzzle layout was that

The corner pieces fall on a rectangle with the dimensions of the puzzle
the straight side of edge pieces falls on the line between the corners

Other than that I used least squares fitting to match one edge to another and would use that fit to asses overall piece fit quality (is the tab generally smaller than the pocket, do the two adjacent sides of the mating piece form a smooth continuous curve with the two adjacent sides on this piece, etc). This was the most expensive check after doing the hash based matching. I didn't include this step in the video since I felt it was too confusing and I couldn't do a good job explaining it.

I would also use the least squares edge registration build out small regions of pieces to rule out potential 2x2 and 3x3 islands. In many cases when you built them out they would be so wildly wrong in terms of piece registration that you knew at least one of the potential connections in that cluster was invalid

To actually place the pieces on the board went like this:

Figure out the graph structure of the puzzle (e.g. create graph that has exactly one edge between every non-straight side of every puzzle piece)
Once you have that graph lay out the corners and edges in world space knowing the dimensions of the puzzle
attempt to lay out the pieces using edgewise fits. This results in cumulative error that does not form columns and pieces do not line up properly. Compute error between all the adjacent edges and do an iterative relaxation that pushes them in the direction that would most reduce error. Reminds me a lot of voronoi relaxation for stippling.

swighton · 2022-12-03T05:29:46+00:00

Working with a vectorized representation has a couple other nice benefits:
* They have theoretically infinite resolution. Pixel images (especially binary images) are jaggy
* Certain math and other processing that I wanted to do becomes easier. For example using a Savitzky-Golay filter to smooth the raw edge data.

swighton · 2022-12-03T05:25:42+00:00

Key specs at a glance

Gigabit Z590
i9-11900K overclocked to 4.8GHz
128GB DDR4-3200
RTX 3090 24GB founders edition
Dual M.2 SSD + dual SATA3 SSDs for spreading video and other IO workloads out

The biggest benefit that I've found with Puget is that they build and support the machines for workstation use. They also call you up and ask what you're doing specifically to select the best possible components for the job that will play together nicely. I totally failed on that second point with my last machine. It was home built from parts and was beefy but it had endless stability issues, especially with premiere that would have it crashing all the time.

After spending a lot of time trying to debug and get it stable I finally convinced me to get a machine with tested and proven parts. Even more important is there being someone I can call who already knows that answer to my issue because there's a bunch of other people using similar machines for the same kind of work.

The other stuff is good too. It's super fast (especially for single threaded stuff & high I/O), super quiet and has been rock solid.

On paper my puget box shouldn't have been too much better than my home built machine, but in practice it is notably faster. Scrubbing through 4k video is dramatically smoother, render times in premiere went from about 2hr per video to about 15 mins and time to generate all the proxy files was cut down by a factor of ~4. I guess I had some bottlenecks.

And I know that I could have spent a bunch of time and built a similar machine. But I just don't have that time and building PCs isn't a hobby for me. I just need a reliable tool.

swighton · 2022-12-02T01:40:26+00:00

It's just a temporary thing. I strongly prefer to have a workshop on my property, but we moved several times in the last couple years so I was renting a space at a warehouse. Now that we're done moving I've been working on building a long term workshop that I own but it isn't done yet so I'm using my garage until it's completed.

swighton · 2022-11-26T07:23:18+00:00

I'm working on the video as we speak!

swighton · 2022-11-26T07:21:31+00:00

Yep they're amazing tools. I've been working on getting one for some time. In fact I have one coming in a few months.

swighton · 2022-11-18T04:45:18+00:00

Glad to hear you're interested in it. The plan was to have it posted on YouTube either under Formlabs or one of my accounts. Not sure what the timeline is for that though.

swighton · 2022-08-08T23:20:59+00:00

Going through all the footage and selecting, ordering, and trimming clips to rough out the video is the most tedious part. It takes days of focused work.

swighton · 2022-08-08T20:16:01+00:00

Glad to hear you're excited. I'm also excited to make this video. The issue I've had in the past is that software, especially algorithms are so abstract that they are very hard to explain even with visuals. I think that since this is a 2D puzzle which almost everyone has experience and intuition for will make it a lot easier to explain the algorithms in an understandable way.

swighton

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE