- While it’s hard to know exactly why the Press is designed as it is, there are several signs that the designers/engineers “went wild” (as my college shop instructor would often say). As one example, let’s zoom in on the locking mechanism that keeps the door closed. It includes:
Large aluminum frame that provides the core structure
10 custom injection molded parts
1 solenoid to keep the door latched but not structurally closed
Motor and controller board
2 stamped steel parts
1 coil spring
2 custom dowel pins
4 bushings
1 gear
Various screws, cables, connectors, glue, etc
All this just to keep the door closed.
I'm surprised they did their own power supply and gearbox, since those are pretty much jellybean parts. Drill motor (or a motor for tin shears or something with a bigger gera reduction), solid state relay to control the AC power to it, and a worm gear drive box to turn the leadscrew. If the juice pouches were round instead of rectangular, you could have the front door screw on (maybe a quarter-turn multi-start thread), although that's not very futuristic! It also might be just as much machining to make that as it is for all the parts in the Juicero. Regardless of whether or not this design is silly, it's always interesting to take stuff apart and see how it was made, and it's unusual to see things that weren't particularly engineered towards a price point. But damn, I'll bet you their injection molding tooling bill was 7 or 8 figures all said and done.
I think there's somebody there who said "we've got $120m, our demographic data says people will pay $X, make it look fucking cool" and they ended up in corner-case bizarro land. I think you or I or every undergrad design class on the planet could come up with a dozen different ways to do this cheaper. But since none of us are Yves Behar, and since none of us were asked, that is what they ended up with. Let's be honest. Beef up a Bodum and you're there.
The post itself is pretty much about "why did they do it this way". Here's the money quote: Juicero raised nearly $120M from well-known investors before shipping a single unit. The team spent over two years building an incredibly complex product and the ecosystem to support it. Aside from the flagship juice press, Juicero built relationships with farmers, co-packing/food-processing facilities, complex custom packaging, beautifully designed mobile/web applications, and a subscription delivery service. But they did all this work without the basic proof that this business made sense to consumers. Constraints during the earliest stages of a hardware company’s life force founders to carefully allocate resources to find creative solutions. I hope this post serves as a lesson to other hardware startups that spending tens of millions of dollars on product development prior to shipping a single unit is a goal that’s not worth striving for. Compare and contrast: Juicero anticipates its customers will spend $35 a week filling their $700 juicer with bagfruit so they can drink fresh juice. Blue Apron anticipates its customers will spend $30 a week making three meals for two, no $700 gadget necessary. And Blue Apron is just barely hanging on - this is a company with a $2b valuation and nobody is really sure if it can make it long term. The trail of dead is long. And hamstringing your marketshare by putting a $700 roadblock between you and your customers doesn't help - and when you knock that $700 roadblock down to $400 you look like you're gouging.Hidden away in Juicero’s bad week of press is one of the most powerful lessons we preach to hardware startups: unconstrained development is lethal.
We've subscribed to Blue Apron since... March 2013? I appreciate what they do. They're useful; I know three meals a week are handled and the rest I can figure it out. But they've suffered since they've been made more accountable to their backers. We see a lot of repeats and generally, where things were initially a meat and a carb and a veggie, now it's a meat and a carb or a meat and a veggie. Meanwhile they've gotten a lot more... frugal. Last night was "burn some cabbage while cooking it with a russet potato while a couple pieces of cod get stuck to your other pan." Total cost of that meal can't be over five bucks but they charged us $20. And fuckin' A we've had a pink lemon every week for months. I get it - y'all got a deal. But pink lemon juice and shallots and creme fraiche is just a fancy way to say "tartar sauce." At one point I had plans to start a blog called "Or Use A Zester" that catalogued all the stupid shit Blue Apron suggests you do in pursuit of food. They generally assume you have one pan, one knife, one pot and a potato peeler... unless they have two things that need to be cooked at once in which case suddenly you have two pans. Otherwise? "wipe out the pan". They will also create meals by going "boring, easy-to-aquire protein" plus "boring, easy-to-acquire vegetable" plus "bizarre condiment you would never eat otherwise prepared in a stupid way." Tonight or tomorrow I will be cooking chicken and rice with "stupidly fiddly deep-fried shallot rings because fuck you that's why." Their instructions are also hit-or-miss. Sometimes they walk you through the eight steps necessary to cook a pot of rice. Sometimes they're all "fold the napkin into the shape of a swan."
When I remember, I check the comments before I start. I can find most of the pitfalls but sometimes they still get me. I've also learned that 9 times out of 10 their cooking method for meat is "season with salt and pepper then add to olive oil that will spatter all over your kitchen" so even though I bought a blast shield specifically for their shit, I grill whenever I'm suspicious.
Step back from that ledge my friend. It's an unimaginative solution, and I bet that they iterated themselves into that very complex and durable vice. I am also willing to bet that at the same time, they found they needed to chop up the fruit and veggies more and more so that they had an even squeeze. Here's what I might have done: http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200329714_200329714 There's a reason why powerful machinery uses hydraulics.
Seems like the whole P = F/A thing is kind of lost on them in the chase for clean design. A simple roller press would do the trick, and could be built for very little money; don't even need hydraulics. Anyway fuck every company ever who raises $120M for a useless product. I hate them all equally.
https://www.juicero.com/blog/juicero/the-journey-to-juicero/ Hey, that's two Teslas, buddy. Count em. One Tesla, two Teslas. P=2Teslas That much is true. I was just thinking that if you didn't want the constraint of needing to start with juicy pulp, you might be able to get somewhere with hydraulics. Also, that stupid pack is going to burst at the seams with Tesla-lifting power unless you are applying pressure everywhere except for the port. The pack should be a cylinder, and the piston should push down. $120M. Christ.Seems like the whole P = F/A thing is kind of lost on them in the chase for clean design.
The Press itself creates three to four tons of pressure—enough to lift two Teslas—and enough to squeeze out every drop of organic fresh kale, spinach, apples, and other fruits and vegetables into your glass.
A simple roller press would do the trick, and could be built for very little money; don't even need hydraulics.
You see? Even as you attempt to sway my resolve, you are drawn into the Schwartzchild Radius of its stupidity. It is a poem in metal, a zen koan of wastefulness. They want you to buy like 6 packs a week at $35 each. This gets you about 40oz of "juice" that expires quickly. Alternatively, you could go Amazon Fresh and get about 150oz for about the same amount of money. But then you don't get to eat the pulp. Or you could buy, you know, a juicer. Or, at the prices they're charging, a half-dozen juicers because you have to get kinda aggro to meet their price point. But then you will have to source your own fruits and vegetables and will have to find someone else to recycle your non-existent juice packs: Really, the art of turning something you chew into something you drink has a storied history going back before the dawn of recorded history but no one that I know of has ever invoked QR codes and a UPS supply chain before. The thing is truly the Concorde of stupid VC ideas and we live in a world where Segways are on like Rev 8.The Pack itself (the outer layer) is recyclable at any recycling drop-off that accepts plastic bags (i.e. local grocery stores), or send them to us and we’ll recycle them for you. The Packs must be clean and dry, with the pulp removed from inside. Check here for more details. Also, the pulp inside the Packs is fully compostable or reusable.
This is one of the funniest conversations I've ever read on this site.
Impressive or not, incorrect is incorrect. I can forgive Han Solo doing the Kessel run in twelve parsecs, because well, light sabres. Someone making a point about how awesome their engineering is without knowing the correct unit? Doesn't pass muster. You have Google. Use it.
"Here in America, we measure pressure in pounds, goddamnit. Fuck the metric system." The odds overwhelmingly favor someone having said that over not. I'm a dynes guy, myself.
And when you study engineering in America, you get to do problems in dynes and slugs and lbf so that your professors can say "and this is why the entire scientific community is behind the metric system." Inches/feet/yards/miles is one thing. it's all fun'n'games until you have to invoke dimensional analysis and suddenly the entire system of measure explodes in a pyrotechnic nightmare of single-use coefficients.
Studying engineering in Canada means that you will use both the imperial and the metric system pretty much arbitrarily. If during first year they at least pretended like the metric system was the one they were sticking with, as time went by I realized that we have been tricked with no hopes of escape.
One of the confusions between English and metric is the whole force/mass thing. Pounds are a force measure by default, not as a special edge case. One can talk about pounds of mass, but only if it is specifically mentioned. The slug, though rarely used, is the default mass measurement in English units.
In the part of space over America, you still weigh many pounds. 'cuz yer fat
Edit: I blew it (see b_b's response). Been up all night writing. Huge paper. Forgot you aren't even remotely American. Stop being better at English than 90% of my country, Devac. Edit2, proper response edition: Yeah, that's exactly the pound we're talkin' about. Pound it dawg. And I wouldn't be a very good am_Unition if I didn't feel compelled to tell you that slugs are large diameter shotgun bullets, where I come from. ^ Nah, I made that up, but you can't tell. My favorite real thing, still. It had a few thousand upvotes before it disappeared from the subreddit, I can't find it there anymore. Gonna be hard to beat a visualization already on the cutting edge so far ahead of its time. Aaaand I'll bury the only meaningful b1ts in the middle: I will be doing outreach soon. Significantly more outreach than talking mad shit, at least. It's on the calendar now. I've also kinda been practicing on accident. thread is A++ 100.1% yessers thx bwah Now get back to work, everyone.As you can see here, in the top rated post for a 5 year period on /r/dataisbeautiful, a Tootsie Pop is coated in 47 licks of candy, on average
=meNstitches Anyone not owning 2 Teslas didn't read that far anywayP=2Teslas
Here's the really dumb thing. It's pretty clear the basic concept was this: Which, hey, arbor presses are no big deal so they could have worked from this: But then they met the guy who came up with this: And all of a sudden they needed a fucking FOUR TON RAM in order to generate 125 psi. You are well out of the world of easy hand leverage and all of a sudden you've got an industrial product sitting on the counter. There had to have been a moment where the engineers were sitting around, staring at this fucking catastrophe of a concept, and one of 'em said "We could do it with a bottle jack" and one of the other ones said "We can't put a fucking bottle jack on a kitchen counter" and another one said "Dude we're fucked, aren't we" And then another one said "Well, we haven't had to value engineer a goddamn thing yet, so let's get freaky" And here we are. That Sodastream Play? My wife bought us one. It broke inside 3 months. The thing that replaced it (for free) has far fewer moving parts.
Oh I certainly wouldn't use it for its intended purpose! I prefer to chew my food and besides, if I want an Odwalla there's a grocery store a quarter mile away. But the level of precision machined aluminum - Okay. Someone more clever than myself once pointed out that there's a terrible urgency to guns - their mechanical nature and high-durability precision demands that their triggers be pulled. It's technological fetishism to be sure but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Buddy of mine has a lot of Bosch rail at work. They go through so much of it that they often sell it as scrap. per pound. And there's something about Bosch rail that almost forces you to figure out how to make a coffee table out of it. It will be pure womanbane and you won't care because you have a bosch rail coffee table. My father owns a Norden bombsight. It's currently in my old bedroom at home. And someday, it will be mine. that does not mean I wish to drop bombs. I price-shop Curtas regularly.