Prototyping with Applied Science: Design and build a bite sensor

Join me in brainstorming and building a bite force sensor that allows paraplegic musicians to smoothly control an expression pedal. This video will include construction tips and tricks, methods, material selection, and a little design philosophy.

[mumiemonstret]

You mean there are burglars that won't appreciate a scanning electron microscope or plasma sputter chamber?

[matthewjohnstone]

When your equipment requires so much education to sell that it's not even worth stealing

[SeanHodgins]

Half of prototyping is knowing when a design is a dead-end. Great explanation of your process.
I guess the good news about burglars is that if there was a Venn diagram of "Can identify expensive scientific equipment" and "steals things from people's garages" the overlap is incredibly small.

[hinz]

You should market these as TIG finger pedals.
Old 2 button TIG torches are awkward to operate and foot pedal doesn't work if you're like lying under your car or in standing position, so that thing somewhat nicely integrated into a TIG torch would be totally nice.

[treesap]

Sorry to hear about your Christmas “anti-present”. It’s awesome how you were so light hearted about it!

[drink__more__water]

I appreciate the honesty, or at least directness, of calling a product "Sorta-Clear"

[treesap]

As a pianist, and someone with a working jaw, I really appreciate this!!

[awesomeness]

I can't believe you were robbed by the grinch

[TimLF]

"you might be thinking" yes that's exactly what I was thinking.

[dittilio]

This format of video should be mandatory for capstone projects, masters and PhD dissertations as preamble for final product presentation.

There is SO much knowledge and value in being able to follow the path of reasoning, trials, errors, obstacles (burgled!!).

And the key I think is that it's not 'judged', it's so relaxed and conversational. It's just, "I wanted to achieve A, by doing B, but ended up with C. I'm kinda okay with C."

[kylejacobs]

I guess the burglar didn't recognize a turbomolecular pump when he saw one.

[AwesomeGames]

An interesting point, that super white lithium grease is what’s used in a lot of manual paper towel dispensers because it works so well with those types of plastic. My father did property management work (janitorial mostly) for a college and he would occasionally replace the grease in the dispensers on campus to keep them moving smoothly and it’s something I learned myself for use in some of my own projects.

[Flojer]

There are "mouthpiece pads" at music shops sold for woodwind insturments. That's what musicians use against bite damage.

[hadinossanosam]

As an amateur pianist, I do want to point out that (acoustic) piano pedals are not linear: they have a clear pickup point, where resistance suddenly increases and the transition of dampeners on the strings to off the strings happens, usually within only two or three centimeters of pedal movement. This has the benefit of enabling much faster pedalling (by limiting the effectively used range), and marking the half-pedal point. However, the original electronic pedal probably didn't emulate this, and given the short range of your sensor, it's probably not beneficial to do this and further shorten the effective range.

Random tidbit: Grand and upright pianos have different dampener mechanisms (I think grands have gravity-return dampeners, which obviously wouldn't work for an upright), which leads to drastically different pedal feel between them: some uprights can have almost linear responses, while grand pianos tend to have very defined pickup points with sometimes annoyingly small effective ranges. As a result, half-pedal tends to be much easier to hit consistently on an upright than on a grand (but also has different effects, ...)

Edit: Disclaimer: I play pretty much only acoustic pianos, so there may be some nuances to pedalling on electronic pianos that I am completely unaware of.

[calchen]

Every time you post a long form video I tell myself "Ah I'll watch some of it". Always end up sitting through the whole thing. This is the clear hallmark of an effective presenter

[qfytidw]

Imagine what a complete shit you'd need to be to burglarize someone's lab on Christmas Day and steal their tools.

[johnyoungquist]

You can tune the useful rotational range of a pot with silver conductive paint. It works with composite or wire wound.

[jatag]

Every non-engineer executive or manager needs to watch your channel. Especially this episode. This is excellent in clearly explaining R&D work and how prototyping without fully defined requirements is necessary. So many requirements can only be determined through prototyping. Excellent video!!!

[jason-genr]

most of that is incredible, but the most incredible is that you 'found' what you were looking for on digikey.

[tymekuzarczyk]

That's awesome. Everything: you helping disabled person, design process and showing it to us