We at Chordata Motion believe that our business is not only about delivering quality products that help people achieve a specific goal. Instead, we strive for a mix of economic and cultural goals that drive our efforts further. One of those goals didn’t use to have a way to name it until recently (or at least it was not as widespread). As you may have guessed by the title, we’re talking about right to repair.
Do bear in mind that we’re not experts in the subject, so do feel free to go to those who are, such as Louis Rossmann for a more accurate description of what the Right to repair movement stands for. Having said this, we thought it was worth it to spread the word about this movement and therefore decided to express our thoughts on this matter to the best of our capacity.
What is right to repair?
As of today, no one can prevent you from repairing any piece of hardware, so don’t feel ashamed if you don’t understand what right to repair means simply due to the ambivalence of the name given to this cause. In essence, if you can access all of the electronic components, have all of the information at hand, and are willing to do so, there’s nothing stopping you from repairing your hardware. Now, the “if” behind all of these conditions is what some companies rely on in order to prevent the possibility of a repair actually happen.
Imagine if we offered you motion capture sensors and we told you they could be repaired if you’re willing to do the job while, on the other end, asked our providers to manufacture non-standardized parts and not sell those same components to anyone but us. Imagine that we also prevented you from getting, producing, or spreading the schematics of our sensors and threaten you with legal actions if you bypassed those artificial limitations. If, after doing all this, we claimed that we offer the possibility of repairing our systems, you’d undoubtedly laugh in our faces. This is a clear example of what the Right to Repair movement stands for: the removal of artificial limitations on the repair capabilities of the user.
This does not mean that a company needs to create electronics that are easy to repair by design (although that wouldn’t be such a bad idea), but simply that it needs to restrain from creating artificial limitations on the repairability of the hardware they create so that the user (or an independent repair center) can perform a clean repair on the products that he or she worked so hard to get.
Right to repair Vs. Open Hardware
When talking about Right to repair, some people may confuse the ideas behind this movement with those that inform the Open Hardware initiatives, as both are proponents of empowering the user by providing knowledge on his or her hardware, but there’s a fundamental difference between both of these movements.
On one side, Right to Repair proponents fight for legislation that prevents companies from generating artificial limitations on the capacity a user has when extending the life of his or her hardware. On the other end, the Open Hardware movement fights for a change in the electronics manufacturing industry by pushing for a paradigm in which people are empowered to produce their own hardware (if they’re willing to take the time it needs in order to be able to do so). The intersection of both of these movements is the willingness to allow information on hardware elements to be widespread so that the user’s freedoms are expanded. The difference between them is that one advocate for the possibility of extending the life of hardware that was manufactured by a company, while the other wants the user to feel capable of generating their own hardware.
With that being said, we at Chordata Motion think that Right to Repair and Open Hardware have a lot in common and therefore could join forces in order to change certain practices that have unfortunately become the standard behind electronic manufacturing.
Why do we need to support Right to Repair?
As you may have noticed, the answer to this question is sort of self-evident to us, but there’s no harm in getting closer to the reasons why one would support groups that defend Right to Repair legislation. Here are just a few angles from which one could justify our support to this initiatives:
1. Ecological.
We need platforms that allow their users to guarantee the longevity of his or her hardware. This not only makes sense as a strategy in order to reduce electronic waste but also in order to help people improve their spending habits as they redirect resources to more valuable elements of the economy that are not simply imposing artificial limitations on their user base.
2. Political.
The word freedom has to come up at some point. Users simply need to be given the choice on when to change their devices, but they also need to be able to customize their systems as far as possible. If someone purchases a piece of hardware and is not able to do what he or she wishes with it, then one has to wonder who really owns the device that has been exchanged.
3. Cultural.
Right to Repair creates a different kind of relationship with electronics and also furthers independent and freelance local work by allowing users willing to take the time to be able to gather all of the elements and information that they need in order to work on their hardware.
There will surely be more reasons to support the type of initiatives that we’re referring to, but we just wanted to give a quick overview of the most important ones, at least from our perspective.
How can we help Right to Repair?
As we see it, there are 3 main approaches that can further our right to repair:
Serviceability is the capacity to perform an easy and clean repair on your own (or with the help of an independent professional). Designing the parts of a system so that they can easily be switched is key to guaranteeing that a user or a repair facility will not encounter any issues, at least when performing the easier and less risky repairs.
Schematic availability could be translated to those not interested in electronics as the possibility of acquiring the map to your electronic components. Imagine that you couldn’t get the information on where your water pipes pass through on your home. How would you perform heavy repairs on your house without the fear of hurting its foundations? With electronics, the “maps” that guide us are called schematics, and some companies work hard in order to prevent anyone from getting access to, generate or spread the word on them. This limits our capacity as users to perform hard repairs or ask an independent professional to do so.
Standardization simply means working with parts that are easily available on the electronics market. Those proprietary charging ports that some companies install on their devices are a simple example of what it means to limit repairability by preventing the user from acquiring the electronic components needed for a repair. If there are no companies that offer a component (and the ones that do are legally bound to not sell it to any third party), then the user’s right to repair his or her device is restrained.
As a company, we strive to go as far as we can on each of these 3 points. There are some compromises we need to make, as sometimes the reality of electronics manufacturing does require one to use a component that’s not a standard one or simply to take the time it would require for an easy-to-understand and useful schematic to be produced. Still, having all of these points into account when building hardware is what guarantees that we move forward on this effort.
As individuals, we need to make this issue visible by directing our purchasing power, whenever possible, to products and companies that promote the right to extend the longevity of our hardware. There are great initiatives, such as the FairPhone or the Framework Laptop, which strive for easy-to-repair electronics that users can take advantage of for as long as they wish to. It’s in our hands to support initiatives like these so that the economics of scale start helping our pockets and make best practices in electronic manufacturing a reality.
This article was written by Juan Luis Casañas
]]>We are excited to announce that Chordata Motion has been awarded an Epic MegaGrant! It is an honor for us to receive recognition from one of the most important video game companies in the world, which also happens to be an actor that we look up to within our sector. We really appreciate their support for open tools like ours.
Epic MegaGrants is a $100 million Program from Epic Games that support game developers, enterprise professionals, media and entertainment creators, students, educators, and tool developers doing amazing things with Unreal Engine or enhancing open-source capabilities for the 3D graphics community.
In 2019 Epic awarded the Blender Foundation $ 1.2 million and in 2020 they did the same with Godot for $ 250K, so its support for Open Source projects is strong and persistent.
The MegaGrant that Chordata Motion received will be used to develop the native plugin for Unreal Engine, together with the Remote Console, that will enable our users to control their capture process straight from their smartphone. Additionally, throughout this integration process, we will be improving our API and making it more accessible for developers who want to interact with the Open Source software components of our system.
It seems that this last quarter of the year has been loaded with exciting news. We’re at our peak and more focused than ever on our roadmap, so be prepared for the next stage of Open Source motion capture!
]]>Base scenario
Picture yourself in January 2020. We were all living our common lives and eventually buying tech products here and there. At that time, ordering an item from the other end of the world and receiving it within a week or so was a very common thing to do. We have to keep in mind that even if the producers and warehouses that distribute these products come from all over the world, the vast majority of them are manufactured in a specific region of the planet, namely east Asia.
It’s also worth pointing out that lately, almost every tech producer thought that it was mandatory to include at least one microcontroller in his or her products. We are talking about things like cars, computers, and refrigerators, but also flashing lights for your bicycle or even domestic water filters that inform you about their status through BlueTooth!
This is one of the causes that partially explains why things went crazy because the semiconductor manufacturing pipeline is particularly narrow. The visible part of it for most of us are chip-making companies, but they often rely on external foundries to make part of the actual silicon processing.
Let’s picture ourselves a simplified pipeline where chipmaker MTECH which has a plant somewhere in Europe outsources the production of the silicon wafer to foundry XMC which is located in Taiwan. Let’s add some arrows to indicate the shipping requirements of either raw material or elaborated products. This imaginary chain ends up with the distribution of the finished chip to a car manufacturer, a smartphone company, and an electronics retailer which then distributes the chip among smaller buyers.
A system with limitations
It might not seem narrow from here, but if you look at it from the chip consumer point of view, you will discover that there might be just a few producers offering the particular chip that is needed. On the other end, the producers might have only a couple of foundries in the world capable of actually manufacturing that technology.
In a normal scenario, this fluctuation on the demand requirements would be compensated by boosting up the production capacities of the existing plants which were normally not working at a 100% duty cycle. That’s how the system remained in balance.
But during last year several factors came into play to heavily disrupt this dynamic. There were some periods of time where many factories had to drastically reduce the working shifts or directly shut down for some days due to global lockdowns. This happened first in East Asia, where the first parts of the process tend to be made. Then came most western countries. The first stage of the pandemic also caused reductions in the availability of raw materials and disrupted the regular shipping process.
Keep in mind that we are picturing a simplified version of the pipeline here. A real one would show further factors, and a small delay on a single one of them could affect the outcome of the complete production and commercialization process.
These early factors certainly hit the production process, but if it was only for them the complete system would have probably been able to recover in a few months. There was another cause that created a more profound and complicated disruption.
The perfect storm
During this past year, with people locked at home, a big part of our human activity was channeled through digital devices: from entertainment to work-from-home duties. Almost everyone was buying a new computer, tablet, or gaming console. The cloud service providers also had to increase their data center’s capacity to absorb the new demand (just imagine how much the video conference traffic has increased lately). As a response, consumer electronics producers started increasing their demand for chips.
At the same time, another big industry was expecting a plunge in the demand caused by people staying at home. Carmakers reduced their orders for the chips that are currently found all over modern vehicles.
This scenario remained as expected for some time, but after an initial valley, the demand for new cars ramped up again (probably because of the necessity to avoid public transportation). By this point, there was no way to actually make the cars that people wanted to buy because the lack of only one tiny chip might stop the production of an entire line of cars.
Everyone in almost every tech industry in the world started doing what is natural in a situation like this: buying every possible chip available to stock them up in their own warehouses in order to avoid having to shut down entire production lines in the future.
Having all the major actors frantically buying chips took the semiconductor factories to the limit of their capacity. There are simply no more production facilities on earth to make more chips than the ones that are currently being produced. The big problem is that many of those chips are ending up in the warehouses of big tech companies as a prevention measure. The smaller producers and components retailers which represent a small fraction of the chip maker’s income have virtually no power to get some priority in the distribution of these chips.
Faced with this strong demand, and the inability of the industry to satisfy it, a new actor burst onto the scene: the brokers. The brokers already operated prior to the crisis as agents for the purchase and sale of electronic material, but now they began to buy and store large quantities accumulating stock, to resell it in the market at multiplied values, not always guaranteeing delivery or delivering products in good condition.
Facing the reality
This is not a simple issue to deal with, as chip manufacturing plants are not easy to deploy. Each one might require several billion dollars and take a couple of years to be completed. Even if there was some sort of improvement, the reality is that few semiconductor producers are willing to take the risk of creating new plants because there will probably be a stabilization of the situation at a certain point and no chip manufacturer wants to end up with an increased production power to satisfy an unexisting demand. Both the European Union and the current US government have taken note of the implications of this situation and seem to be ready to take some action on this matter, but the results of these movements will surely take some time.
Based on the information gathered from our providers, we at Chordata Motion preview a re-stabilization of the semiconductor production by the end of this year. In what applies to the specific electronic elements that we require, by November 2021 there will be a more steady flow of such components, which has allowed us to set our delivery dates for the last months of 2021. This is by no means a safe bet, but it’s a highly informed preview based on the information delivered by global providers.
So there you go. What we described is a gigantic simplification of the problem. There are actually more factors that need to be taken into account, but we wanted to keep this as brief and consistent as possible. We hope this article helps you understand a part of the complex situation we are all going through and also serves as a starting point for a broader discussion on the dynamics that lay behind our consumption habits.
Let’s keep on moving as fast as reality allows us to.
]]>We have recently closed our first investment with the Open University of Catalonia, which from now on will be a partner of Chordata Motion. It is an investment that we have been pursuing for a long time and that stalled for a few months, due in part to the context of great global uncertainty in which we found ourselves. We could have gone with a regular Venture Capital, but for us, it was very important to find a partner that was aligned with the Open Source values that the community back up: openness, transparency, community, and collaboration.
The Open University of Catalonia [UOC, for its Catalan acronym] is an Internet-centered open university based in Barcelona, Spain. They have been working to establish closer cooperation links with businesses, other universities, R&D bodies, and community stakeholders in order to make sure that the institution achieves its goal of transferring knowledge and technology to multiple communities.
UOC promotes entrepreneurship, open innovation, support for knowledge transfer of results, and cooperation among the entire university community (students, alumni, teaching staff, collaborators and management staff of the associated companies). It also has amazing professors and researchers with whom we are starting to make alliances to take the development of our hardware and software further.
New [and exciting!] Horizons
We have no time to lose, so as soon as we received the confirmation from the UOC as a new partner, we got down to work in order to finance new developments. Thanks to this new partnership, we are able to activate several developments which will set the bases for a new algorithmic layer of the framework:
Of course, all these new developments will be published alongside the core of the system, so we are very proud that Chordata Motion is giving the global community the first complete and usable mocap-oriented algorithmic modules as a freely available resource.
]]>You ask for it, and we deliver it! Our pre-sale is now open, so you can pre-order your favorite kit with a discount on the final retail price. Only 20 kits are available!
In the following video, Juancho gives you all the details:
Visit https://chordata.cc/pre-order/ and order yours!
]]>In terms of social interactions, 2020 was an odd year, with cyclic lockdowns and openings. Keeping in touch with our close ones was one of the main challenges for all of us. The lockdowns are a bizarre experience in itself, but one of the strangest parts for me was when I topped it all up with a fever. It ended up being just a regular flu in the end, but for precaution my doctor ordered me to lock me down in a room for two weeks. Being there just a few meters away from my family and not being able to hug them or have a direct conversation was hard for all of us, but especially for my six-year-old daughter who wasn’t able to wrap her head around the reasons we couldn’t just see each other.
So this time I decided to build something for her to keep us in touch in case something similar happens. The basic concept is a simplified interface for a Telegram voice chat with only a few (big) buttons: it should allow to easily and intuitively send and receive voice messages. Of course having a raspberry-pi as the core of this device was a no-brainer, since It has everything that’s needed for the project: WiFi connectivity, low level interface to control leds and buttons, and of course a complete OS where to run a Python interpreter to control everything.
A good idea when dealing with electronic projects is to start small and have a proof of concept working before getting all the components and wire the whole thing together. In this case I started by creating the main program but replacing the physical button interface with a TUI (terminal user interface). The code can be found in this repository, you should be able to test it by running it using the --tui
flag like this:
python -m daddy_box --tui
The first time you run it you will need to give it a telegram bot key. Follow this steps to create your instance of a Bot, and then run it with the --setup-bot
flag and input the information the BotFather gave you.
You should now be able to search for the bot’s username in telegram and exchange some messages with it. You will first find that you get “not allowed” responses. The idea behind this bot is to exchange messages privately with just one user, so you have to tell the bot which is the allowed user id to interact with.
Take a look at the terminal where the bot is running, you will see some printed messages like this one:
Copy your user-id from there and give it to the bot using the --setup-user
flag. You should now be able to send and receive voice messages, so we are ready to start with the physical part of the project.
When doing a one-shot project like this I normally use breadboards or perfboards to assemble all the components. I used that approach a bunch of times in the past to handle a few backlitghted buttons, and the process was always frustrating: I ended up spending lots of time with the soldering and wiring of the components. So this time I decided to actually do what I promised myself each one of those times: design a breakout HAT for the raspberry with screw terminals where to easily connect everything.
Since I was at it I added a darlington array and a number of selectable power sources in order to potentially handle bigger loads. I designed it in Kicad and then ordered a few PCBs. You can find the project files here.
One little detail I wasn’t taking into consideration when I started the project was the fact that a raspberry pi doesn’t have an audio input. So I had to buy an USB microphone. A cheap one from a local store did the trick. I removed all the plastic parts and shortened the cable to avoid unnecessary EM interference.
Before using it I also tried a small USB audio card but I had a lot of conflicts being raised by pyaudio, the library I used to handle the recording and playing of audio files in python.
For the audio output I connected a small speaker directly to the RPi audio output jack. The volume is a little low, but it gets the work done.
Once the PCBs and all the components arrived it was time to replace the TUI with a Button UI. I used the handy gpiozero library to handle button press and leds. For the external case I used a shoe box to which I made holes for the buttons and speaker.
Once everything was set and tested I disassembled and packed all the components inside the box, wrapped the whole thing as a gift to prepare it for the best part.
I gave the box as a present to my daughter to be opened on Christmas eve without telling her what the purpose of all those parts were. The next morning we spent a couple of hours putting it all together, so she discovered the purpose of the device, its final shape and got a glimpse of the internal functionality during the process.
When it was done my kid liked it way more than I could ever expect. What I conceived as an utilitary tool to keep us connected when I wasn’t close soon became a part of a game of exchanging messages about every little action in the everyday routine, even when we are just a few meters away .
So I’m quite happy with the result. Not only did this object help strengthen our relationship, it ended up being a cool way to transmit the hacker-maker values and habits to a young mind.
I hope some of you find this useful and if you try to build this at home I would love to know how it went for you, please share your experience in our forum using the offtopic tag.
And above all, have a great starting of the year!
]]>This last month we have been working very hard on the textile solution and the prototype of the sensors, and very soon we hope to be able to show you a preliminary result. As you know, due to the collapse that is occurring in some European customs due to COVID 19, the material necessary for prototyping arrived late and this (among other consequences of the pandemic) caused a delay in our planned schedule. Due to this situation, we may have a small delay in the delivery of your rewards. At the moment, we do not foresee that it will be a hold-up longer than 3 or 4 months. In the following video, Juancho gives you all the details.
If you want more information about the latest news regarding the Chordata Motion’s production, we recommend you take a look at our social networks, since we have been posting photos and videos of how the process is progressing.
We wish you a happy holiday season and hope you have a great start in 2021. We know that we all want 2020 to end so that, hopefully, 2021 offers us a less challenging year! We do not want to end this last message of 2020 without thanking you wholeheartedly for your support during this complex year. We work very hard every day, but it is thanks to you that Chordata Motion has already become a reality!
We know that 2021 will also be full of challenges, but we are prepared to face them. At the same time, we feel excited because this new year, at last, the first Open Source motion capture system will be available on the market. We know this will be a game-changing tool for many people.
2021, here we go!
]]>If you are considering contributing to an Open Source project, you might be thinking, “where do I start and what should I take into account?” In order to help you out, we have prepared this short guide for you with some recommendations that will make your way into an Open Source project smoother.
If you are considering contributing to an Open Source project, we recommend you begin introducing yourself to the community with small contributions. Keep in mind that behind the software there is a human group. This means that, as in any human relationship, introducing yourself is a key step.
2. START WITH SMALL CONTRIBUTIONS.
Helping an Open Source project doesn’t necessarily mean writing complicated code. There are many other ways to help. For example, giving good feedback is a MAJOR contribution. If you detect an error, you will help a lot by writing a detailed report of the error and including it in the correct issue tracker, so that developers can understand the problem more easily while saving time in troubleshooting.
Another great help could be to improve the documentation: if you discovered an aspect that is not yet described in the documentation, you can modify the existing one so that the limitation you encountered is easily bypassed by someone else.
3. CONTRIBUTING WITH CODE.
Programming is the most advanced level of contribution and is always welcomed, but we recommend that, before taking this step, you start with simpler aspects, such as reporting a problem or improving the existing documentation. Bear in mind that a set of style standards are required to accept new contributions, so make sure you carefully read the Contribution Guide. That way, you’ll be informed of how to contribute to the project accurately. If the group of maintainers already know you when you make your first code contribution, it will be easier for them to understand why you made that modification (maybe, for example, you’re fixing the bug you reported earlier) and, therefore, you will have more chances of your contribution being accepted.
If you want to start contributing to Chordata Motion, you already know a few ways to do it. See you in the forum!
]]>When we started this project back in 2015, the motion capture options were extremely expensive, and non of the options available worked with an Open Source approach. Now, five years later, several cheaper options have been released, but all of them still work with closed software and hardware. We wanted to be different because we believe that knowledge is power, and our main goal is to empower users. Choosing the Open Source way allow us to:
If you want to meet some of these collaborators and see the new features they are working on, visit our forum!
]]>What a launch!
The Chordata Motion Kickstarter campaign has raised over €42.000, that’s a 120% of our initial funding goal. We’re blown away by the incredible response from our community and are so glad that Chordata Motion is being so well received.
Thank you all for the support you’ve given this system – whether you’ve been a backer, a beta-tester, shared the campaign, or supported Chordata Motion on our forum or social media. There is still a long way to go, but we will not stop until the rewards have arrived for you! We can’t wait to see what incredible things you will do with your Chordata Motion kits.
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