OpenAero – A open source design system for Bike Accessories

After designing, building, rebuilding, and re-printing dozens of accessories for my bikes over the last few years, I wanted to create and share a open source design system for accessories for bikes that allows myself (and a community) to innovate and collaborate on these types of products. Here is a snippet from the readme file:

Our goal is to develop a modular mounting system for bicycle accessories — ranging from water bottle holders and lights to phone and cycling computers. Partially inspired by Gridfinity, this system provides a base platform and is intended to be stackable. The motivation behind the definition and open source nature of this project is to encourage community-driven design and innovation in the triathlon space. read more

Bookmark: Open Source Charting Library

Happy to have stumbled across a new open source charting library for JS from the Apache Foundation. Having used everything from paid version of Highcharts.com, ChartsJS, Plotly to D3.js … it’s always a pleasure to find such a broad, well supported and extensive collection.

DIY – Canyon Garmin Mount

My second CNC project on the Carvera Air is a Garmin mount for my MTB. I have 3D printed these in the past, but thought it would be a good introduction to CNC. I also made a small water bed to cut the Carbon Fiber in to avoid the nasty dust which is generally made when cutting or sanding it. Fun weekend project!

Carvera Air CNC

Super stoked to have finally received the Carvera Air which I ordered on Kickstarter about 9 months ago!!! After doing a bunch of 3D printing and laser cutting with the Glowforge, I really wanted to test/try out CNC’ing and see what I could learn and build with a small desktop machine. I have been considering this for probably 4+ years, but never found the right machine or the intention to spend the money. Last year I decided to pull the trigger and after a long wait it finally arrived 🙂

First project was building a couple small parts to understand the workflow which I think turned out great. Overall, I am already really impressed. I think I will be constrained by the bed size, but will cross that bridge when I get to it 🙂 read more

The UX of Lego Interface Panels …

After posting about the $100 million checkbox … I have been wondering about other really bad interface choices which have made it out into the world (and subsequently were the culprits of disaster). This is a nice article from the Interaction Magic team show casing the UX design of Lego Interface Panels, and some examples of (real world) bad patterns.

The UX of LEGO Interface PanelsLEGO interface panels are beautiful, iconic, and great for learning interface design basics. I bought 52 of them from BrickLink to explore the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.Read Moreinteractionmagic.com

Aero Bottle Cover

A fun 3D print to Carbon Fiber project.

Designed in Fusion 360, 3D printed a mould and did a wet layup in Carbon Fiber. Pretty happy with the way it came out and impressed it held up even on the really rough NZ chip sealed roads!

There was a lot of trial and error on this due to the deep cavity and needing a vacuum to hold the material in place.

Gridfinity – Endurance Edition

Gridfinity is a great solution for 3D printing custom storage solutions. There is a “Gridfinity” layout for hundreds If not thousands of tools, home goods, workshop items, kitchen utensils, you name it … the best part is that if something doesn’t exist, you can pretty easily design and then 3D print it.

Gridfinity Catalog

I decided to take that challenge on since there are not many Gridfinity designs for smaller cycling or workout items, like the Garmin Varia, Drop sweat monitor, Core Body Sensor or Garmin Edge unit I have. Using the design reference and a super handy Plugin for Fusion 360, I designed and printed a bunch to keep my work space organized. Below are some images and the prototypes of the prints. read more

Carbon Fiber Arm Rests

This is my second pass at producing something strong enough and reliable enough to put onto my triathlon bike, and in this case some carbon fiber arm rests. My current arm rests pretty much did the job but at 300+g for the set, it seems like an easy win to reduce weight by making something similar out of CF.

The design for these took quite a lot of time, lots of trial and error and mistakes along the way 🙂 Cardboard cutouts, angles and long prints were the most tedious aspects, but ultimately I think they came out OK in the end.

Ideation and prototyping Steps