Finalising designs & testing components
Our product team has been back in China working with manufacturers to test, improve and finalise the designs for Joto.
Choosing the best components
Component selection is a critical part of designing great products. While performance is crucial, it needs to be balanced with other important factors such as cost, availability and ease of use in manufacturing.
Some of the most important components for Joto are the rails that we use to slide the moving parts along. There are seven rails in total on Joto — if we told you why, we’d have to kill you ;) but let’s just say there’s a lot of sliding going on!
The other factors to consider, and perhaps the most interesting to you, are noise, weight, and reliability. So we’ve been working hard to get the rails just right, so that Joto is as smooth, quiet and agile as possible.
One of the unique things that Joto can do, that no other drawing machine has done in the past, is to work at speed and against gravity. It needs to do this, so that you can hang it on your wall. That’s why the components need to be as lightweight as possible.
There’s a whole world of rails out there, and some of the ones we’ve been testing range from the ones you’d find in an inkjet printer, to the ones you might find on an aircraft tray table — well maybe in business class, not that we know too much about that!
Worth bearing with us
Bearings are the things that slide along the rail. Traditionally you use a bearing that consists of lots of little metal ball bearings, allowing things to slide smoothly over the rail.
This works well for the sliding, but it makes a terrible noise! Not only that, but you need to apply quite a bit of grease, to keep them moving smoothly over time. And that’s not something you want to be doing on your living room wall!
If we haven’t yet bored you with bearings, we thought you’d be interested to see some of the combinations we’ve been considering…
The perfect combination
Our previous technology used carbon fibre as a lightweight material in order to solve this problem, but when it comes to sliding something along carbon fibre it makes quite a racket. In fact, lightweight materials suitable for rails tend to rattle more than heavier ones.
The other problem we found with carbon fibre, is that after some wear and tear, a fine black dust starts to appear. And that’s definitely not what we want Joto creating in your kitchen!
Polymer bearings
We’ve been working with the clever guys at IGUS who make a different type of bearing. These bearings are made of special plastic that can slide along rails without the need for lots of littles metal ball bearings and don’t require any WD-40 to keep things moving.
The really cool thing about IGUS plastic is you can also 3D print the plastic into all sorts of weird and wonderful shapes or buy sheets of it to cut out. Check out these 3D printed custom ones we tried. If you’re interested, you’ll need to ask Barney why they were printed in this shape!
In the end we’ve selected a combination of bearing and rail that’s quiet, lightweight, rigid and cost effective.
We’re working hard to finalise everything in order to freeze the design so we can progress to tooling. We’ll show you videos of the final prototype once we’re happy we’ve got everything perfect.
And some more testing…
We’ve also been testing different servos (small hobby motors). Servos play an important part in the actuation of the pen. Crucial for making sure we achieve even and consistent contact of the nib on the surface. We won’t go into more tech details — but we’d thought we’d share this cool video of the rig Barney has been using to compare servos:
Connecting with makers in China
After our trip to Shenzhen, we managed to squeeze in an afternoon of visiting some of the maker community, and also one of our Joto backers in Hong Kong.
We visited MakerBay located in trendy PMQ — a design hub in a former police quarters (Police Married Quarters). We didn’t have time to visit the main space as we had a plane to catch, but we’ll be back very soon.
There’s a lot happening in Shenzhen and Hong Kong within the maker community, so we’re happy to be among friends.
If you have any question, requests or would like to tell us about an idea you’ve had for Joto, drop us a line at hello@joto.rocks
The Joto team
