About myself

I guess it would be a good idea to introduce myself, as this is my first post. I’m a sixteen-year-old electronics hobbyist from the Netherlands. I have always been interested in science and technology, but ever since my parents gave me an Arduino three years ago, I have been hooked. Yes, I’m one of them Arduino kiddies. (I hope you don’t find my code and PCB layout too appalling.)

Anyhow, on to the project.

Intention

Some years ago I had an odd job at a high-tech company, programming an embedded system. It was quite challenging to come up with algorithms sometimes, you really needed to be able to visualise them. Normally, I would have sketched it out on a piece of paper to kind of control my thought flow. However, this just so happened to be a paperless company, so I had to find another means to do it. Suffice it to say that MS Paint didn’t really cut it.

I think there is a need for a device that replaces scraps of paper, sticky notes and the like. It should have the same ease of use as paper, but not be as messy. Since digital devices have some more possibilities than paper, the experience should also be enhanced. For example, the device should have the ability to save your drawings as vector files for documentation and do some semi-automatic things, such as making your wrangled lines straight. Also, it would arguably be more environmentally friendly than paper in the long run.

There are some devices currently on the market that come close. Drawing tablets, for example are quite nice input devices. Their only drawback – no pun intended - is that the cheap models have no screen for visual feedback. This means that you can’t just have them laying around somewhere and use one on a whim, they need to be connected to a computer at all times. Also, you need some degree of hand-eye coordination to use them. As far as I could find, the devices that do somewhat meet my requirements, such as the Sony digital paper, cost upwards of a thousand euros.

I should probably mention at this point that I like to design my projects as if they were products, for practice. This means that you are going to see some design for manufacture (or, at least if I do my job properly).

Requirements and nice-to-haves

So what makes paper so much easier to use than a tablet? Well, I think it boils down to the following core issues:

• You can rest your hand on paper while drawing, which you can’t do on a tablet.
• You can accurately pick a point on paper to draw from, which you can’t on a tablet. This is most evident when trying to write something on a tablet.
• Paper just looks nicer than a tablet. It has a better viewing angle and doesn’t emit light into your eyeballs.
• Paper is easily available. It doesn’t have a long start-up time, and can’t run out of battery power. You can just pick it up and start drawing.
• An easy-to-use searchable system for organizing the notes.
• Some tools to draw perfect shapes, such as circles and regular polygons.
• Tools to beautify lines drawn by the user. They should make somewhat straight lines perfectly straight, and somewhat curvy lines perfect curves.
• Easy control over thickness of the line, and preferably colour as well.
• As good as an integration with a computer as possible.

As mentioned earlier, I would like to go beyond just fixing the issues of drawing on computers, and also enhance the user experience. For that I would like to implement the following:

I want to try to design something that could be sold for about €350, at a maximum. Applying the 2,6-rule, yields that the project may only cost about €135, which I guess would be in about a 1k volume.

Also, for some reason I think that it would be really cool to have the design be waterproof. This may be more of an exercise for me than anything else, but the concept of having a paper replacement that works where paper could never work just fascinates me to no end.

Please note that these requirements are not really set into stone. I have no idea how many I will be able to fulfil, but I’ll try to design my project with these requirements in mind. Maybe I will even add some later.

And another quick disclaimer up front: I don’t finish all of my projects, and I have no idea whether I’ll be able to finish this one. We’ll see.

Documentation

I’ve actually been designing this project for a few weeks now, but I’ve waited with posting my progress here because – as mentioned above – I didn’t know whether I would actually finish this project. Because of this, I’m writing the documentation ‘from the future’, but I’ll still try to document all the steps that I’ve taken. This might even include minute details if I feel like writing about them. But please forgive me if I mix up the tenses every now and then, the fact that English isn’t my native language doesn’t help me there.

I’m going to try to post one log daily the following days, to get the documentation up to date. The details section will be the aggregate of those logs, but it won’t contain any information on the struggles I encountered while designing the project.

License

All the files will be released under something like a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International or more open license. You can use this documentation under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license

State of the project at the present day

Currently, I’ve ordered most parts for the electronics. The design for the enclosure is almost done, and I’m contacting local fablabs to see what it takes to produce it. I don’t expect to be able to have the PCB’s in before the first deadline, so I don’t think I will be able to have a prototype up and running before the deadline. I might try to experiment with some algorithms needed in the software though.

Well, I hope you have a bit of an idea what I’m trying to achieve now. I guess you should keep reading if it interests you.