15 ms·

I'm not a mechanical engineer, but it seems like a roller would be able to provide a more efficient and focused method of squeezing than a press they're using n

I'm not a mechanical engineer, but it seems like a roller would be able to provide a more efficient and focused method of squeezing than a press they're using now. What we see in most products is a result of the accountants saying "no" to too much. Cheap parts, assembled cheaply, pennies saved per part. What we see here is the exact opposite: the accountants didn't say "no" nearly often enough. Apple manufactures custom everything because they can, and because they sell at massive scales. Juicero wanted to be Apple quality without selling at Apple quantity. I fully believe you get a better cup of juice squeezing with their massive press rather than by hand because it can press over a bigger surface. I also believe it doesn't matter a bit, because this is a worthless piece of equipment. Beautiful engineering, though.

jasonlaramburu 10y ago
You would still likely need a large motor and drive even with a roller-type design. Gravity will cause the solids to settle at the bottom of the juice bag. The roller would presumably need to contend with this.
pyrophane 10y ago
It would also be trivially easy to construct something that squeezes the juice packets between, say, two wooden cutting boards, that would apply uniform pressure over a large surface area in the same way that the juicero does. Then, what do you have left? A bunch of features that I doubt people really care about, such as automatic disabling of packs (seriously, just send me an email) and reorder reminders?
- astrodust 10y ago
  A $8 tortilla press can do the job as well or better than this over-engineered piece of junk. A $15 pasta roller can probably come pretty close.
  - jasonlaramburu 10y ago
    I don't think a roller would work. The solids in the bag would settle to one side of the bag and form a clump. You would either need a ton of torque to drive the roller and smash the clump or a slip-roller.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      If this discussion goes on for much longer there will be something even more complex than the device shown.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      A double-roller system will probably have that problem, but twisting the bag in on itself and just torquing it will probably work, the bag's pressing against itself in a fairly uniform manner.
- unfamiliar 10y ago
  I highly doubt you can apply that much pressure without wooden boards breaking or warping.
- exsf0859 10y ago
  I think the main reason for the QR code is to discourage third-party juice packs.
  - angryasian 10y ago
    Well that might be part of it, but the reason is because the juice had no preservatives so they will go bad. Honestly it would be a product failure if people were getting sick for using the bags after they've gone rotten
    - ascorbic 10y ago
      If only there were some simple way of indicating a date by which a food should be used. Maybe they could make it human-readable.
- rdl 10y ago
  I wonder if you could get uniform pressure by putting the juice bag itself in some fluid, then pressurizing that? I mean obviously you could, but I don't know if you could get 15 bar or whatever they are going for using something relatively inexpensive. (OTOH, it would be annoying if it exploded)
dsmithatx 10y ago
I came here to bring up the roller idea myself. They could make a quick cheap mechanical version and low price point. They might actually be able to deal in volume and recover from their first attempt.
- joezydeco 10y ago
  So how do you keep the pulp in while letting the juice out, and not having the business end of the plastic package violently explode like a tube of toothpaste in a vise?
fooey 10y ago
Yeah, all it really needed to be is a modernized mangler: http://i.imgur.com/t3QRmgb.jpg http://i.imgur.com/t3QRmgb.jpg
apendleton 10y ago
Even Apple products might only have one or two custom-machine parts, and they're usually the enclosure, which the customer can see and maybe makes the prettiness matter to make the thing seem luxury. They don't have tons of internal separately machined components (it's all injection-molded, I think), and I'm sure they look for cost-cutting opportunities in internal components too (Tim Cook's background is in logistics, after all).
- gcb0 10y ago
  yep. saying this is well designed because they overcome all the hurdles with brute force is like showing how awesome is your webapp random-sort algo because you have one 24 core machine per user request. just look how expensive are all those servers! look! no cloud either! not even co-locating! isn't it awesome! (wasn't a question)! saddest part is that we are getting cheap fly-by-night puffy pieces. HN used to only alow the expensive ones on wired to pass. This community is dying :(
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  And the trick with their custom-machined enclosures is they're also the internal structure. That saves on remaining internal parts.
  - killjoywashere 10y ago
    Did you ever take apart their plastic macbooks? They were packed to the gills, with 3x as many screws and parts as any Dell.
    - lukeholder 10y ago
      That's why the aluminium unibody design has been the standard now.
spilk 10y ago
Based on seeing what is inside the bags, most of the work is already done by the processing equipment at the factory, making the press the least important part of the process.
- astrodust 10y ago
  It's the most important part in terms of raising funding for this ridiculously stupid concept.
awalton 10y ago
> but it seems like a roller would be able to provide a more efficient and focused method of squeezing than a press they're using now. Or maybe, just maybe, a screw-driven piston, like many actual juicers have... But let's be completely honest - the machine was always meant to be an expensive countertop device. It looks expensive, it weighs a lot, people will think you spent a lot of money on it even if they don't know how much it'll cost... This is exactly why the engineering staff was told "go nuts" on the hardware design - the more expensive and custom, the better. It does the job of looking like a high-end appliance exactly and precisely, and really nothing more. This company always intended to make its money back selling overpriced juice packs like Keurig, banking on people with more money than common sense buying and using the hell out of these devices for the $14 juice packs. Selling the machines near cost or even as a loss leader was perfectly acceptable, as long as customers had to come back to them for more juice month over month. It just turns out consumers were smart enough to see through the not-so-clever ruse of buying a $400 counterweight to squeeze a package of pre-squeezed juice out of a bag and into a cup...
- PaulHoule 10y ago
  Keurig is not that bad. The system is out of patent so you can get off-brand brewers and cartridges that aren't quite as good in quality but are unlikely to cause a terrible mess in a hotel room.
  - IAmGraydon 10y ago
    Keurig is great at one thing: making the worst coffee this world has to offer. That aside, I though they went to DRM enabled cups in the last few years in an attempt to block the aftermarket cup makers.
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      ...the worst coffee this world has to offer. Having heard this from a number of coffee fans, I suspect you're not the market Keurig really targets. Rather I suspect we non-coffee-drinkers might be the primary buyers. We want something that will sit innocuously in the kitchen, looking good and doing nothing, on the off chance that we'll be expected to provide coffee for someone. We don't know how to buy coffee, we don't know how to prepare it, and we don't know how to clean up after preparing it. Also, we don't care to know any of those things. So, here's a something we made for you that came out of a fancy package. Now we're going to throw away this little plastic cup.
quasse 10y ago
I am a mechanical engineer (a machine design engineer in fact) and this press looks like would happen if you hired 30 of 23-year-old me fresh out of college, gave them an effectively unlimited budget and said "make me the swankiest press you can imaging". Lots of clever ideas and fancy machined parts with no thought for cost savings or whether there's an easier way to do something. 15A 330V DC motor? To squish a bag of pulp? The best things I've gotten career and skill wise from more senior engineers has been the feedback where they looked at a design and said "looks fancy, but what were you thinking?". This machine looks like it needed some more grizzled manufacturing veterans to inject some sense into the design process.
- SEJeff 10y ago
  How would you, given what you know now, do this better? Not saying you can't, just curious what your experience has taught you to do differently.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    How about gear it further down behind a smaller motor for starters? It's not like you're about to start wood turning, there is already a gearbox in there, with the right ratio a much smaller motor likely would suffice. That thing is so over-engineered it is almost as if it was a joke.
    - gingerbread-man 10y ago
      Apparently the press already takes ~2.5min to make a glass of juice. A smaller motor would probably take even longer
      - jacquesm 10y ago
        The competition (hand press, bottles) and so on are way ahead of them then. Maybe we can out-do them and build a hydraulic version: "Now with 50 tons of pressure". I have a hydro pack lying around here somewhere with a really neat 3" puck piston. I'm sure that would do the job just fine and maybe even a little bit quicker.
jasode 10y ago
It's interesting that an alternative machine called JUISIR on Kickstarter/Indiegogo also uses a full surface press instead of rollers. (If multiple teams are avoiding rollers, there may be some non-obvious disadvantage with that configuration.) Scroll down half way to see the gif animation of the mechanism: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1793272089/juisir-juicing-without-the-cleaning https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1793272089/juisir-juici... It would be interesting to see if their engineering choices resulted in a much less expensive machine to manufacturer. Indiegogo page: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/juisir-zero-cleaning-maximum-juice#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/juisir-zero-cleaning-maxi... gif direct link: https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/010/304/9b81fed3f5e8827f49b304099869366c_original.gif?w=680&fit=max&v=1483004023&auto=format&gif-q=50&q=92&s=42b22e9c4e0ddb7f95f342dada674596 https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/010/304/9b81fed3f5e8827...
- taneq 10y ago
  > (If multiple teams are avoiding rollers, there may be some non-obvious disadvantage with that configuration.) It's just product differentiation. And remember, their target market are the kind of people who want to feel special by one-upping the other #rawvegan #fitspiration #healthnuts on social media.
- bsder 10y ago
  > If multiple teams are avoiding rollers, there may be some non-obvious disadvantage with that configuration. My suspicion, if I put my engineering hat on and give them the benefit of the doubt, is it's an optimization for later. Right now, the purchased packs you can buy are effectively already juice. Later, you may want to make them less juicy so you can spend less time manufacturing the packs, but people will scream if you make them buy a new machine. So, your first machine out the chute needs to be way overengineered. Nevertheless, this machine design screams junior engineers.
beloch 10y ago
A roller is what I thought of while reading this too. It seems fairly obvious, but I would be surprised if there wasn't an even better design. Juicero's people must have thought of this and the superior alternatives in the very early stages and then decided to do it the way they did anyways. I know nothing about Juicero, but it seems like there must be somebody who thought they were the second coming of Steve Jobs overriding both the engineers and accountants. That person's reality distortion field must have just popped rather loudly.
- nickhalfasleep 10y ago
  A roller also needs something to press the contents towards it without grip for traction of it's own, so I imagine you need two separate mechanisms.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

jasonlaramburu 10y ago

You would still likely need a large motor and drive even with a roller-type design. Gravity will cause the solids to settle at the bottom of the juice bag. The roller would presumably need to contend with this.

pyrophane 10y ago

It would also be trivially easy to construct something that squeezes the juice packets between, say, two wooden cutting boards, that would apply uniform pressure over a large surface area in the same way that the juicero does. Then, what do you have left? A bunch of features that I doubt people really care about, such as automatic disabling of packs (seriously, just send me an email) and reorder reminders?

astrodust 10y ago
A $8 tortilla press can do the job as well or better than this over-engineered piece of junk. A $15 pasta roller can probably come pretty close.
- jasonlaramburu 10y ago
  I don't think a roller would work. The solids in the bag would settle to one side of the bag and form a clump. You would either need a ton of torque to drive the roller and smash the clump or a slip-roller.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    If this discussion goes on for much longer there will be something even more complex than the device shown.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    A double-roller system will probably have that problem, but twisting the bag in on itself and just torquing it will probably work, the bag's pressing against itself in a fairly uniform manner.
unfamiliar 10y ago
I highly doubt you can apply that much pressure without wooden boards breaking or warping.
exsf0859 10y ago
I think the main reason for the QR code is to discourage third-party juice packs.
- angryasian 10y ago
  Well that might be part of it, but the reason is because the juice had no preservatives so they will go bad. Honestly it would be a product failure if people were getting sick for using the bags after they've gone rotten
  - ascorbic 10y ago
    If only there were some simple way of indicating a date by which a food should be used. Maybe they could make it human-readable.
rdl 10y ago
I wonder if you could get uniform pressure by putting the juice bag itself in some fluid, then pressurizing that? I mean obviously you could, but I don't know if you could get 15 bar or whatever they are going for using something relatively inexpensive. (OTOH, it would be annoying if it exploded)

dsmithatx 10y ago

I came here to bring up the roller idea myself. They could make a quick cheap mechanical version and low price point. They might actually be able to deal in volume and recover from their first attempt.

joezydeco 10y ago
So how do you keep the pulp in while letting the juice out, and not having the business end of the plastic package violently explode like a tube of toothpaste in a vise?

fooey 10y ago

Yeah, all it really needed to be is a modernized mangler: http://i.imgur.com/t3QRmgb.jpg http://i.imgur.com/t3QRmgb.jpg

apendleton 10y ago

Even Apple products might only have one or two custom-machine parts, and they're usually the enclosure, which the customer can see and maybe makes the prettiness matter to make the thing seem luxury. They don't have tons of internal separately machined components (it's all injection-molded, I think), and I'm sure they look for cost-cutting opportunities in internal components too (Tim Cook's background is in logistics, after all).

gcb0 10y ago
yep. saying this is well designed because they overcome all the hurdles with brute force is like showing how awesome is your webapp random-sort algo because you have one 24 core machine per user request. just look how expensive are all those servers! look! no cloud either! not even co-locating! isn't it awesome! (wasn't a question)! saddest part is that we are getting cheap fly-by-night puffy pieces. HN used to only alow the expensive ones on wired to pass. This community is dying :(
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
And the trick with their custom-machined enclosures is they're also the internal structure. That saves on remaining internal parts.
- killjoywashere 10y ago
  Did you ever take apart their plastic macbooks? They were packed to the gills, with 3x as many screws and parts as any Dell.
  - lukeholder 10y ago
    That's why the aluminium unibody design has been the standard now.

spilk 10y ago

Based on seeing what is inside the bags, most of the work is already done by the processing equipment at the factory, making the press the least important part of the process.

astrodust 10y ago
It's the most important part in terms of raising funding for this ridiculously stupid concept.

awalton 10y ago

> but it seems like a roller would be able to provide a more efficient and focused method of squeezing than a press they're using now. Or maybe, just maybe, a screw-driven piston, like many actual juicers have... But let's be completely honest - the machine was always meant to be an expensive countertop device. It looks expensive, it weighs a lot, people will think you spent a lot of money on it even if they don't know how much it'll cost... This is exactly why the engineering staff was told "go nuts" on the hardware design - the more expensive and custom, the better. It does the job of looking like a high-end appliance exactly and precisely, and really nothing more. This company always intended to make its money back selling overpriced juice packs like Keurig, banking on people with more money than common sense buying and using the hell out of these devices for the $14 juice packs. Selling the machines near cost or even as a loss leader was perfectly acceptable, as long as customers had to come back to them for more juice month over month. It just turns out consumers were smart enough to see through the not-so-clever ruse of buying a $400 counterweight to squeeze a package of pre-squeezed juice out of a bag and into a cup...

PaulHoule 10y ago
Keurig is not that bad. The system is out of patent so you can get off-brand brewers and cartridges that aren't quite as good in quality but are unlikely to cause a terrible mess in a hotel room.
- IAmGraydon 10y ago
  Keurig is great at one thing: making the worst coffee this world has to offer. That aside, I though they went to DRM enabled cups in the last few years in an attempt to block the aftermarket cup makers.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    ...the worst coffee this world has to offer. Having heard this from a number of coffee fans, I suspect you're not the market Keurig really targets. Rather I suspect we non-coffee-drinkers might be the primary buyers. We want something that will sit innocuously in the kitchen, looking good and doing nothing, on the off chance that we'll be expected to provide coffee for someone. We don't know how to buy coffee, we don't know how to prepare it, and we don't know how to clean up after preparing it. Also, we don't care to know any of those things. So, here's a something we made for you that came out of a fancy package. Now we're going to throw away this little plastic cup.

quasse 10y ago

I am a mechanical engineer (a machine design engineer in fact) and this press looks like would happen if you hired 30 of 23-year-old me fresh out of college, gave them an effectively unlimited budget and said "make me the swankiest press you can imaging". Lots of clever ideas and fancy machined parts with no thought for cost savings or whether there's an easier way to do something. 15A 330V DC motor? To squish a bag of pulp? The best things I've gotten career and skill wise from more senior engineers has been the feedback where they looked at a design and said "looks fancy, but what were you thinking?". This machine looks like it needed some more grizzled manufacturing veterans to inject some sense into the design process.

SEJeff 10y ago
How would you, given what you know now, do this better? Not saying you can't, just curious what your experience has taught you to do differently.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  How about gear it further down behind a smaller motor for starters? It's not like you're about to start wood turning, there is already a gearbox in there, with the right ratio a much smaller motor likely would suffice. That thing is so over-engineered it is almost as if it was a joke.
  - gingerbread-man 10y ago
    Apparently the press already takes ~2.5min to make a glass of juice. A smaller motor would probably take even longer
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      The competition (hand press, bottles) and so on are way ahead of them then. Maybe we can out-do them and build a hydraulic version: "Now with 50 tons of pressure". I have a hydro pack lying around here somewhere with a really neat 3" puck piston. I'm sure that would do the job just fine and maybe even a little bit quicker.

jasode 10y ago

It's interesting that an alternative machine called JUISIR on Kickstarter/Indiegogo also uses a full surface press instead of rollers. (If multiple teams are avoiding rollers, there may be some non-obvious disadvantage with that configuration.) Scroll down half way to see the gif animation of the mechanism: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1793272089/juisir-juicing-without-the-cleaning https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1793272089/juisir-juici... It would be interesting to see if their engineering choices resulted in a much less expensive machine to manufacturer. Indiegogo page: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/juisir-zero-cleaning-maximum-juice#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/juisir-zero-cleaning-maxi... gif direct link: https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/010/304/9b81fed3f5e8827f49b304099869366c_original.gif?w=680&fit=max&v=1483004023&auto=format&gif-q=50&q=92&s=42b22e9c4e0ddb7f95f342dada674596 https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/015/010/304/9b81fed3f5e8827...

taneq 10y ago
> (If multiple teams are avoiding rollers, there may be some non-obvious disadvantage with that configuration.) It's just product differentiation. And remember, their target market are the kind of people who want to feel special by one-upping the other #rawvegan #fitspiration #healthnuts on social media.
bsder 10y ago
> If multiple teams are avoiding rollers, there may be some non-obvious disadvantage with that configuration. My suspicion, if I put my engineering hat on and give them the benefit of the doubt, is it's an optimization for later. Right now, the purchased packs you can buy are effectively already juice. Later, you may want to make them less juicy so you can spend less time manufacturing the packs, but people will scream if you make them buy a new machine. So, your first machine out the chute needs to be way overengineered. Nevertheless, this machine design screams junior engineers.

beloch 10y ago

A roller is what I thought of while reading this too. It seems fairly obvious, but I would be surprised if there wasn't an even better design. Juicero's people must have thought of this and the superior alternatives in the very early stages and then decided to do it the way they did anyways. I know nothing about Juicero, but it seems like there must be somebody who thought they were the second coming of Steve Jobs overriding both the engineers and accountants. That person's reality distortion field must have just popped rather loudly.

nickhalfasleep 10y ago
A roller also needs something to press the contents towards it without grip for traction of it's own, so I imagine you need two separate mechanisms.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]