Archive for the ‘Office Supplies’ Category
Engineers and Draftsmen
The arts of engineering and drafting have come a long way in the last few decades. Civil engineering, electrical engineering, architecture, and all of the accompanying drafting were done by hand with a pencil, paper, and a slide rule. Engineering students had to learn not only the skills to design buildings, roads, and electronic circuits, but they also had to learn how to draw out the schematics and blueprints by hand. Things have changed quite a bit. Today, computer programs and multi-function calculators take care of many of the functions that were done by hand years ago, allowing engineers to concentrate on design and allowing draftsmen to complete many more drawings in the same amount of time.
Computer programs like AutoCad give draftsmen the ability to create perfect drawings in a short period of time. Instead of needing a large drafting table, t-squares and rulers, drafting pencils, and a slide rule, the user simply has to input information and the computer renders a drawing with perfectly straight lines of the exact length. Where it used to take hours to complete one drawing, several drawings can be completed in a day. Even better, when a change must be made, rather than drawing a whole new picture or erasing the current picture, the variables in the program can be changed in a matter of seconds and the new drawing completed. If somebody needs a copy of the drawing, printers are available with large paper rolls to print out the document in whatever size is required. In the past, the drawing would have to be copied by hand, which was extremely tedious. AutoCad and other drafting programs give the ability to do quality work in a short period of time. The program does not make calculation errors (unlike humans) and any input errors can be corrected in little time.
Advanced programmable calculators perform complex functions that engineers of many decades ago never dreamed of. An engineer today does not need to be a math genius to design something, he simply has to know how to operate the calculator. The most complex engineering math, problems that could take several minutes to work out, can be completed in as much time as it takes to input the problem into the calculator. This saves engineers thousands of hours over the years, giving them more time to work on actual designs, making them far more productive than they would have been with rudimentary tools. Higher levels of productivity make an engineer worth more, allowing a firm to complete more work with fewer people.
Advances in engineering and drafting technology have revolutionized the engineering industry. Engineers working on buildings, roads, electronics, or any other designs have a bevy of tools at their disposal. Some might call the engineers of today “lazy” for having machines and computers to do the tedious work, but the increase in productivity makes any such call sound like sour grapes. As technology advances, engineers will have more and more time available to work on actual designs, having to spend less time doing calculation and drawing work.
Deconstructing the Computer Printer
Sometimes the best inventions come from looking at a problem in a completely different way. For example, let’s go through the process of designing a new computerized printer and let’s say we need something that is going to handle high volume application in a commercial setting, perhaps printing receipts in an ATM.
Let’s first examine some of the problems with regular computer printers. The ink is too expensive and runs out often. Paper jams with some regularity, ruining print jobs and wasting time. The printer is too big and bulky. Computer printers break down too often. Computer printers are too expensive.
Let’s imagine we have free rein to do anything with the new design of the printer. The first problem, for example, can be easily solved by eliminating ink altogether. If the printer doesn’t need ink, then the ink won’t be too expensive and it won’t need to be replaced. We’ll worry about how to solve the problem later.
The paper jams taking the printer out of service until it can be fixed. In examining a jammed printer we see that this often happens as a new sheet of paper is fed into the printer slightly out of alignment. The corners catch on the machine and it gets stuck. What if we didn’t use individual sheets. Instead we could use one long continue roll of paper so that there is no corner or edge to get hung up as it is fed into the machine sheet by sheet.
The printer is too big and bulky. First, since we’re only printing ATM receipts, the printer doesn’t need to handle 8.5” X 11” sheets. It only needs to be wide enough to handle a 2 or 3 inch wide receipt. Ok let’s go a step farther and take out some parts. We’ve already decided we don’t need ink, so ink cartridges and the mechanism to hold them can be removed first. The electronics that switch between the different colors of ink can go. In short, let’s just examine the entire mechanism and reduce the number of parts everywhere we can. That should not only solve the problem of size, but should also help with cost. Fewer parts means less manufacturing. It also means fewer things to wear out and go wrong.
As it turns out, all of these solutions are already being used in today’s ATM printers. Thermal printers are constructed of a simple design using fewer parts, and fewer moving parts than conventional ink printers. They don’t use ink. Instead they use thermal paper that already has the ink locked away in the paper. When heat is applied by the thermal printer, the ink becomes visible in exactly the right places to print the receipt. Furthermore, this paper comes on thermal paper rolls instead of on individual sheets.
It looks like by examining all the problems of conventional printers we have arrived at the solution of the thermal printer.