This week was packed full of progress on multiple projects. I received feedback for my group’s birth control information app “MyGallery.” Our work was even featured on CMU’s Design page.
Crafting an iconographic representation for the withdrawal method was my proudest moment.
I’ve continued to explore fluid simulations with Blender. I’ve ran into some technical hurdles: Blender 2.82 uses a variety of protocols to leverage GPUs for rendering and computation. It offers an AI-driven denoiser (Optix), CUDA path tracing, and OpenCL. My MacBook Pro has an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M GPU as well as the option to plug in a Radeon Frontier Edition (first generation Vega) eGPU on Thunderbolt 3. Plenty of GPU compute power in either configuration, but there is a snag: MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) has deprecated OpenCL in favor of Metal 2+. CUDA and Optix are proprietary to nVidia GPUs. Apple hasn’t shipped a Mac with nVidia GPUs since Kepler launched (GeForce 700 series). Blender supports AMD ProRender, but I found it was terribly unstable.
I could easily slip into a tangent about how unfortunate the breakup between Apple and nVidia truly is, but I will spare you.
My current workflow involves queuing some tasks to my desktop, running Windows 10. The GPUs are dual Radeon VIIs. Unfortunately, I found that rendering on Blender is unstable when both GPUs render in parallel. No problem, since I can free up the other GPU for Folding@Home (a hobby of mine that has exploded in response to COVID-19). Who would have guessed that a global pandemic would boost a distributed computing project to exascale?
Despite these obstacles of platform compatibility, I have made significant progress on my simulation-based research. It is difficult to understate how exciting this project has been for me. For some context: the ASCI Red supercomputer (at the Sandia National Laboratories) was built in 1996, and was the fastest supercomputer in the world until 2000. It was the first computer to achieve true terascale computing (one trillion floating point operations per second). I built my first terascale computer in 2013. This was shortly after leaving my job at Intel. There was something very gratifying about building a computer with a CPU I helped manufacture. GLaDOS G4 (you can see the project here, scroll down to “Everything Else”) was built with a GeForce GTX 780 GPU and Intel Core i7 4770k overclocked to 4.5 GHz. It ran nearly silent and fit inside an up cycled Apple Power Mac G4 (microATX equivalent) case.
The ASCI Red supercomputer was designed to simulate nuclear weapons tests. Today, I am using a system roughly ten times more powerful to simulate soup spilling out of a spoon. I was inspired to approach this problem by two projects. The first was a 2013 project from Portland State University (my alma mater) to make a coffee cup for zero-gravity environments. they used drop cages and 3D printing to iterate several designs until they had a shape that held liquid. “It wasn’t needed, but it was requested.”
The other project hit me right in the heart.
The S’up Spoon is the embodiment of good design. The design was inspired by deep empathy for a user’s problem, and the solution involves as little design as possible. There are few technologies in this world that we trust enough to put in our mouths. If you can make it in this space, you can make it (almost) anywhere. During the fall semester, Moira and I visited the Carnegie Museum of Art. They had an exhibition on accessibility design, and I was brought to tears by stories of innovation and vibrant improvements to quality of life for people with disabilities. Technology, at its very best empowers people to realize their fullest potential. We can easily get lost in the exhilaration of the complex, but this impulse must not dampen our ability to appreciate the elegance of simplicity. Some problems are best solved by form. I saw many incredible solutions in that exhibition, but this spoon has really stuck with me.
My goal is not to make something better, but perhaps a little bit different. The shape of the S’up spoon is intuitive, and if we had never seen a spoon before, we might conclude that it is the better design over more traditional forms. It is however, under our current cultural context, a strange thing to behold. It looks more like a wizard’s pipe or a warrior’s horn. It is beautiful and ergonomic. I do not intend to elevate those specifications. Instead, my goal is to make a spoon that is inconspicuous while still achieving similar results for users who suffer from motor movement difficulties.
How has my first design faired under simulation?
While I can certainly see the appeal of a long hollow channel, I’ve become increasingly concerned with how this shape my be difficult to keep clean. I can imagine objects getting wedged toward the back depending on what is being consumed. I have began to work on a second iteration with a more shallow channel. Still, this first iteration does fairly well. It is managing to retain most of the 15ml (i.e., 1 tablespoon) of fluid under rapid movement.
I enjoyed this simulation so much that decided to make a rendering:
I have not yet gotten back into Cinema 4D to evaluate RealFlow. Despite the challenges regarding compatibility, I am truly impressed with how powerful this open source software has become with this latest release.
Now that I have established this workflow, I can easily switch out revised designs to test under identical conditions. I’m still not sold on the current handle shape, and I think I can improve liquid retention by tweaking the angle of the lips. The flat bottom (Chinese style spoon) does fairly well, with it’s obtuse angle walls. Next, I will try a concave structure with a wider base for the handle and a more aggressive descending angle.