Blog Archive (March 2008)
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19th March 2008 - One Laptop per Child Design Award
Nice to see Designer Yves Behar win the Brit Insurance Design of the Year award for the One Laptop Per Child project. The Ceremony was at ceremony at the Design Museum in London last night. The Dezeen blog has a list of all of the Category winners. Further information from the Design Museum:
The first in an annual exploration of the most innovative, interesting and forward looking new work in design of all kinds. Selected from around the world, Brit Insurance Designs of the Year presents 100 projects nominated by a group of internationally respected design experts, curators, critics, practitioners and enthusiasts. These projects fall within seven categories: architecture, fashion, furniture, graphics, interactive, product and transport. The exhibition gives an overview of the most significant achievements in design and architecture in the last year, whether they are projects by a practice, a team or an individual.
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18th March 2008 - Graphene & Transistors
There's an accessible description of Graphene and its potential for taking over from silicon as the basis for semiconductor transistors in this Technology Review overview and interview with Walter de Heer, from Georgia Tech. There's also a link to a video de Heer talking about the subject.
This is a part of the TR10 report on10 Emerging Technologies 2008.
Addendum 26th February 2008: This SciAM article nicely complements the above and adds useful information.
Addendum 18th March 2008: Technology Review has an update on the technology.[ top ]
18th March 2008 - Another Robotics Roundup
The EU funded Symbrian project has as its focus to:
investigate and develop novel principles of adaptation and evolution for symbiotic multi-robot organisms based on bio-inspired approaches and modern computing paradigmsAn early result is the 'sugar-cube' robot; which are designed to intelligently combine to create a single robot for a particular task. As Scientific Blogging notes:
We may be able to use the collaborative power of many robots in situations where human intervention isn't possible. For instance, a Symbrion swarm could be released into a collapsed building following an earthquake, and form themselves into teams to lift rubble or search for survivors.Engagdet has a slightly different take on the technology:
Sugar cube-sized swarm bots could build Transformers, bring destruction upon us all
Meanwhile New Scientist brings news of robotic tentacles which are strikingly lifelike in this video. As is so often the case these tentacles come courtesy of DARPA, which does seem to have the resources to create interesting robots including LittleDog and BigDog - which is really more of a pack mule (shown on right). They've even stuck wireless network hubs onto caterpillar tracks so that they can be flung onto high out-of-the-way spots to set up battlefield communication networks; the 'LANdroids' will use their tracks to move around until they get an optimal signal.
And the International space Station has had delivery of a four metre robot designed to help with extrnal servicing jobs.
If you like your robots humanoid, you'll probably enjoy this video of Tomotaka Takahashi's little robots. The sound quality is dire, but the robots are rather human-like in the way they move.
Finally, returning close to where we started with sugar lumps robots, this snake robot, named Aiko, has a 1.5-metre-long body made from segments of PVC tube with motorised joints. This video shows Aiko in action.
Sticking with snakes, the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University has also been working with modular snake robots.
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6th March 2008 - Robot warfare
A timely warning from the University of Sheffield's Professor Noel Sharkey (Department of Computer Science) is reported by New Scientist, Science Daily and World Science. In the words of Science Daily:
Professor Sharkey, who is famously known for his roles as chief judge on the TV series Robot Wars and as onscreen expert for the BBC's TechnoGames, said: "The trouble is that we can't really put the genie back in the bottle. Once the new weapons are out there, they will be fairly easy to copy. How long is it going to be before the terrorists get in on the act?" "With the current prices of robot construction falling dramatically and the availability of ready-made components for the amateur market, it wouldn't require a lot of skill to make autonomous robot weapons." Professor Sharkey is reluctant to explain how such robots could be made but he points out that a small GPS guided drone with autopilot could be made for around £250. The robotics expert is also concerned with a number of ethical issues that arise from the use of autonomous weapons. He added: "Current robots are dumb machines with very limited sensing capability. What this means is that it is not possible to guarantee discrimination between combatants and innocents or a proportional use of force as required by the current Laws of War.A useful reminder of the need to keep values thinking to the forefront when engaged in design and possibly an interesting context for exploring such concepts with pupils?
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6th March 2008 - Build your own Mobile phone?
Here's an open source mobile phone, OpenMoko, that has also provided for free (under a ShareAlike Creative Commons licence) the CAD files for the enclosure - so even if you don't feel up to reprogramming the Linux, you can redesign the case. Files are available as IGES STEP and ProE. The philosophy of this move is:
Mobile phones, currently closed and self limited, will rival broadband computers. When based on Open standards, they will deliver ubiquitous computing and vanish. Ubiquitous computing means more than computing wherever you wander: It means knowing the locale, weaving seamlessly into the local fabric, and vanishing. Devices disappear when developers have unrestricted access to hardware.
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6th March 2008 - A deluge of robot news
First up, instructions on building a PICAXE robot (shown). This claims:
This is cool because:
- The electronics used are "real parts" (not little homemade things that wont really work unless you spend hours of tweaking, and not a kit that you just assemble and that's it).
- It is EASY to do the basics, you have a robot within one hour!
- You can evolve from here, even with the same parts (if you can bare to take your robot apart).
- It is cheap.
- This is serious, but fun. This is the coolest Robot-beginners-project in any way, end of story! :)
Then details of stairBOT - a stair climbing robot (right).
Both of the above brought to me by the MAKE blog, which also brought me these rules for roboticists. To give you a flavour:stairBOT is a small robot for indoor environments. On even floor it drives like many other small robots with a differential-drive. In addition it can change its length with linear guides mechanism with a spindle-drive. By this mechanism it can - together with its omniwheels (with brakes) and a support - reliably climb up and down regular sized stairs. It was one of the objectives for the design to use as few actuators and sensors as possible.
Meanwhile, the University of Plymouth plans to teach a baby robot to talk (using a 1m-high humanoid baby robot called iCub - shown above) and in Japan robots are entering daily life... STEM anyone....?5. A roboticist is as much an artist as a scientist. Find someone who's done anything truly cutting-edge in science and technology, and chances are, he or she has a bit of an artist's/poet's soul. Independent engineer and self-proclaimed "high-tech nomad" Steven Roberts is often quoted as saying, "Art without engineering is dreaming. Engineering without art is calculating."
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6th March 2008 - Open source hardware
The Emerging Technology Conference, ETech, is just coming to an end in San Diego and (among many other fascinating topics) it featured an interesting presentation [PDF link] on open source hardware by Phillip Torrone (Maker Media) and Limor Fried (Adafruit Industries (the latter being the source of a growing range of open source hardware). As the presentation notes say:
Open source hardware is a term slowly working its way into many new projects and efforts, but what is it? There are a few definitions, some of which come from "open source software," which is usually considered software's "source code under a license (or arrangement such as the public domain) that permits users to study, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form." So how does this translate to hardware? This session will focus on electronic hardware, the layers they can be divided into, different document types, licensing concerns, and a show-and-tell of hardware.The show-and-tell of hardware is particularly interesting (featuring many items seen in this blog) - I think there is a model to be adapted for pupils' work here.
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5th March 2008 - This what a mobile phone should be...
If this isn't the future of mobile phones, it'll be because of marketing decisions made on the basis of narrow profit rather than the needs of consumers - let alone elegance of design.
The Modu is a minimal (minimalist even) phone that is the heart of a modular system of 'jackets' that enhance its capabilities. If you had a modu, you might never need another phone - but you might want a myriad of jackets for different situations.
This is a nice teaser video that gives some idea of the concept:
There's a good description of the concept in this Technology Review article:
... the idea of one phone for all occasions doesn't mesh with people's lifestyle. Sometimes you want to walk around with the smallest possible phone, other times you want a good messaging device with a large keyboard, or a media player with a large screen. "Instead of buying a completely new phone, the jacket enables you to switch."
Beyond cell-phone jackets, Modu Mobile will offer other consumer-electronics devices in which the phone module can be inserted, improving the basic functions of the device. For instance, a camera with the Modu could wirelessly send pictures to other phones, and a car entertainment system designed for the Modu could let a user access his MP3s while enabling hands-free calling.
But you need to go to the Modu site itself to see the range of jackets proposed. This seems a rather cooler idea than the iPhone to me...
Update 5th March 2008:
This article on Google's Android OS for mobile phones suggests a usefully flexible software sysem to go with the Modu hardware:
Android's developers envision a world where today's integrated wireless systems are reduced to a set of relationships between parts that are more or less interchangeable. Consumers will be free to load their phones with applications of their own choosing--free applications, applications available for sale, and custom applications developed by enterprises for their employees. These applications will be able to communicate with third-party services offered over the Internet--using any available communications pipe, be it the cellular network, a nearby Wi-Fi connection, or even a Bluetooth connection from another phone.
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5th March 2008 - Life cycle analysis of solar cells
This is good news from SciAM for photovoltaics (PV):
A new analysis finds that even accounting for all the energy and waste involved, PV power would cut air pollution-including the greenhouse gases that cause climate change-by nearly 90 percent if it replaced fossil fuels. Even taking into account the low efficiency of thin-film solar cells or the energy needed to purify silicon for the other types of PV, all proved to entail significantly fewer emissions in their entire life cycle than the fossil fuels needed to produce an equivalent amount of electricity. In fact, most of their dirty side derived from the indirect emissions of the coal-burning power plants or other fossil fuels used to generate the electricity for PV manufacturing facilities.Update 5th March 2008 There is further detail on this study from the Brookhaven National Laboratory at Science News.
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5th March 2008 - SteamPunk Magazine, Issue Four
OK. This is on the weirder edge of my usual interests..... but there is something rather engaging about the steampunk movement. And if you've not come across steampunk yet - well, perhaps you should and now is a good time as edition 4 of SteamPunk Magazine is now available for free download (donations welcomed...). To give you a flavour:
Welcome back, fellow time-travelers, artists, vagrants, engineers, pirates, bookworms, performers, and other such folk! For that is who we are-we are all wearers of multiple hats (see Molly Friedrich's article on how to create your own! ;). Issue Four of SteamPunk Magazine is a tribute to the multiplicity of our culture. Steampunk is fantasy made real, filtered through the brass sieve of nostalgia.I can't help thinking there's bound to be a few kids in every school who might find their designing and making inspired by steampunk...
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