Will Davies, Valerie and I sat down in one of the modeling rooms for about three hours and went through the design process from brainstorming to building on one of the CAD machines. I conveyed my thoughts to Will and sketched a few ideas out in the RDD journal (all Dyson engineers are issued a journal that becomes property of Dyson) that was issued to me at the beginning of the day. Upon my departure from Malmesbury the journal was confiscated and filed into the library of journals.

Anyway, as I said before, we had about three hours to design and submit our prototype so that it could be built in the 3D modeling machine overnight. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to film the printing machine in action because of what was being built in it at the time. It was really, really cool. Essentially, the designs are uploaded to the machine and it begins to ‘print out’ whatever it was that you uploaded. There are two materials that it lays down and unfortunately I made the mistake of taking all my notes in the RDD journal, so I can’t tell you exactly what they were at the moment. The main compound is a soft plastic and around that is a gel-like material that gives the actual device support while it’s being printed and hardens. The printer basically works like any other printer you’ve seen. It slides across from side-to-side and deposits the material as it goes. My design had to be submitted by 4:30 and by 10AM the next day it was ready to go. After it’s done printing, one of the engineers scraped away the gel-like material and put it through an acid wash and then a quick blow dry to remove any remaining particles.

How did I design it? I thought about the one place that collects the most dust and dirt in my apartment and just looked down at my keyboard. Then I thought about other applications for it. I thought that PC owners would want the ability to vacuum the back of their PC case, so I added a bit of flexibility to it.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I present to you the CrunchGear Dyson Root 6 attachment. We have the only prototype and it will likely remain that way. Heh.

Of course, we had some issues with it, but they weren’t realized until after the fact. There were little nubbins inside the swivel to lock the attachment between it’s 180 degree angle and 45 degree tilt that were placed incorrectly in CAD, so they didn’t exactly come out right, hence the loosey gooseyness of it. But we had less than three hours for the entire process. There also wasn’t enough time to add bristles at the end. Overall, I can say that I’m the proud owner of a one-of-a-kind Dyson prototype. I just hope they don’t make my design better and start selling it. Heh.

I have an iPhone and a BlackBerry. And I have to confess that I use the BlackBerry more. But I really wanted to like the iPhone because it’s thin—one of the clever things about it—thinner than any other phone, and fits easily in your pocket. I find that a nuisance if you’re going to a function or whatever it is. I really like that about it.

I hate the touchscreen. That’s my biggest complaint. I love the weather, really good. Maps are brilliant. The way you are supposed to use it, I really like. I’m not sure about having to slide that thing across every time you answer a phone call. As a way of locking the screen, I accept that because it’s important.

I find the phone contacts list very frustrating because I stroke down and my finger hits one and selects it, so I then have to deselect it and start stroking again. So they need to sort out the difference between stroking it (scrolling) and selecting one. And then I find for some reason it doesn’t select the one I want to select. And I get that on occasion with numbers when I’m dialing. I want to press the 4 and it selects the one below or above.

How about the typing?

It’s awful, but I think the predictive texting is very good, so that makes up for a lot of the bad. Also, you can’t turn it sideways, except when you’re on the Internet. But when you’re doing an SMS or email you have to do it upright.

I think the Internet is good even at these speeds. I like being able to expand what I’m looking at. The Internet is surprisingly good, whereas on the BlackBerry it’s very bad.

Which BB do you have? (An 8700 series)

It’s horrid looking, but I like it. It’s quite interesting because it illustrates my two points about design. This [the iPhone] looks beautiful and some of the things are good, but some are very frustrating, so you fall out of love with it. This [the BlackBerry] looks horrid, awful. It’s not been designed by anyone with any design sense, but emailing on it is fantastic and the software is very good and the cut and paste. Everything about it is incredibly good. I like using it. I hate the symbols on it, they’re meaningless. I use that all the time and use it for phone calls because it’s easier than using the iPhone for looking up contacts. So if they just correct the things one doesn’t like about this.

Then I see my son and son-in-law with a rubber case around it and I thought what’s that all about. Defeats the purpose of it. I’ve dropped it five times onto a concrete floor accidentally and it hasn’t broken. It’s not marked or scratched.

Downloading photos is very good. I use the camera a lot. i think it’s very good. It’s the easiest phone camera I’ve come across. It’s the easiest to use camera. I’ve taken 83 photos and they’re brilliant.
They came out quite well.

I asked James if he had the latest MBP with the multitouch trackpad and he responded with:

“Oh, that business. I haven’t got that.”

Are you getting the new iPhone?

Yes. I’ll get the new BlackBerry as well.

I ramble on about how cool the Bold will be and James asked:

“Is the Internet better?”

Umm. No.

And that was that. To recap, James loves and hates both the BlackBerry and iPhone.

The two photos above are from the EMC (electromagnetic chamber ) which tests the electronic emissions for each Dyson product. Each product sits atop a rotating table and an antennae rises and falls to test frequencies at all levels, so it doesn’t, for example, turn on your TV or vice versa. Both the table and antennae are controlled from another room that has access to the room via the all-plastic camera. Dyson is the first company in the EU to have it’s own testing facility and, in fact, they’re way ahead of the curve. They’re prepared for any future standards that may come up.

The following two images are from the Anechoic chamber which measures noise emissions. Walking into this room from the rest of the hangar was a little creepy. It was eerily quiet. Some of you have griped about your Dyson being loud and whatnot, but this certain ‘noise’ is ok, say Dyson engineers. If these guys weren’t around testing the noise levels you might have a vacuum with a sound frequency that might give you migraines. Each device is optimized for the best possible sound, so you’ll just have to deal with it if your ears are too sensitive. That’s my opinion, not Dyson’s.

And I had to sleep in a hotel bed after this. Eww.

The ‘drop test’ machine wasn’t working on my first day at Dyson, so I asked James to simulate what I might see, had the machine been running. What followed was absolutely hysterical.

This is all based on conjecture, but I did ask a few of the engineers if they were working on an air purifier and they neither confirmed nor denied the claim. It only makes sense considering the fact that the Airblade actually sucks in the surrounding air and purifies 99.9 percent of it before spewing said air 400MPH onto your hands. Why else would Dyson have an in-house Microbiology lab? It can’t possibly be there for just the Airblade, right? Right?!

You may or may not have noticed, but I wasn’t around all that much last week and, no, I was not on vacation like our fearless leader, I was trekking ass across the Atlantic for a visit to Malmesbury, England. Yeah, I had no idea where that was until I arrived at Heathrow airport and hopped into a car for a two-hour drive west. I awoke from my slumber to a quaint little town in Wiltshire at the front entrance to Dyson’s HQ. Yes, that Dyson, the folks who make the vacuums that never lose suction.

Now, vacuums typically don’t jump out at me as must-have gadgets, but Dyson’s are unique in that they’re a perfectly balanced blend of style and engineering. They look really cool. A heck of a lot cooler than your mom’s old Hoover, at least.

So what exactly was I doing in Malmesbury at Dyson, you might ask. Well, I had the opportunity to be the first journo to have a peek into Dyson’s RDD center, which is aptly named the hangar. The entire team of 400 or so engineers/designers are situated in a section of the compound that once housed the manufacturing side of the business before it moved to Malaysia. It was huge. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to snap any photos just to show you the ginormity of the space for legal reasons, but just imagine an empty Costco with nothing but work benches.

Stick around this week because I’ll have plenty of content from the trip that includes a one on one with James Dyson where he spills the beans on his love/hate relationship with the iPhone as well as some of his favorite gadgets, which will certainly surprise you because I was floored. Oh, and a short video of James ‘testing’ one of his vacuums for durability, why you’ll want to replace your sheets every day or, at the very least, wash them every few days, and a video of the Airblade sucking in ‘poo air’ and replacing it with clean air. The coolest thing out of the entire trip is that I got to sit down with Will Davies, from the video, and we designed a new attachment for the DC16 aka Root 6. We hammered out a design in roughly four hours over CAD and the next day I walked away with the only prototype. It was sweet. More on that later this week.