Category Archives: Engineering

Wired NextFest 2007 – Cool Webcasts

Above: The humanoid robot REEM-A walk among people at Wired Nextfest 2007. Cool webcasts from Wired NextFest 2007 in Los Angeles:

Human-Carrying Walking Robot
Multi-Touch Collaboration Screen – There are two very wide (around 16 foot wide) LCD screen. You can drag and move object like the scene in the Minority Report.
Wired NextFest Highlights – Shot by Mark Hefflinger and edited by Graham Kolbeins for Digital Media Wire
Wired Nextfest Executive Director Discusses Tech Future
Hanson Robotics talks Zeno

Highlights of the 2006 Wired NextFest Expo in New York City

Generating Electricity from the Ocean

British Wave Hub Gets The Go Ahead

The innovative (and controversial) UK “wave hub“, in essence a giant plug on the ocean floor, has received approval. The UK government has will install this plug to allow wave power companies to feed energy back into the grid. The Â£28 million ($56.5 million) project has cleared the last major regulatory hurdle and will begin construction soon.
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Wave and tidal power could provide 3 percent of Britain’s electricity by 2020, according to the government-backed Carbon Trust.
The installation is expected to generate up to 20 megawatts of energy, enough to power 7,500 homes and eliminate 300,000 tonnes of CO2 over 25 years. Four companies have already been selected to build projects at the hub.

The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer

photo by Binky the cat or another cat This article is the result of the first Curious Cat engineer interview. My favorite post detailed the great engineering project Jürgen Perthold undertook to engineer a camera that his cat could wear and take photos. So I decided to interview him.

The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer by John Hunter:

This time I thought about our cat who is the whole day out, returning sometimes hungry sometimes not, sometimes with traces of fights, sometimes he stay also the night out. When he finally returns, I wonder where he was and what he did during his day. This brought me to the idea to equip the cat with a camera. The plan was to put a little camera around his neck which takes every few minutes a picture. After he is returning, the camera would show his day.

The Amazing CatCam is not only a great product but a wonderful engineering story. See our past post for some background on how an engineer allowed you to help your cat become a photographer. On the development of the CatCam Jürgen Perthold says, “More or less it was just a joke, born with a crazy idea.” Such a great sentiment and with wonderful results.

What path led him to the desire and ability to pursue the crazy idea and become the Curious Cat engineer of the year? He was born in Aalen, Germany. He started playing with electronics as he was 13. At 15 he added computer programming and with a friend they programmed games, applications and hardware control over the years. He studied Optoelectronics at the University of Aalen, Germany extending his knowledge further.

For the last few years he has worked for Bosch, an international manufacturing company, in the automotive hardware section. Last summer, he transfered from Germany to Anderson, South Carolina as a resident engineer for transmission control unit in a production plant for automobile parts. On a side note, the United States is still by far the largest manufacturer in the world.
photo by Binkey the cat, from under a car
The demand for the cameras is still higher than his capability to produce the cameras. He has raised the price, to limit the demand. When I first saw the prices I couldn’t believe how inexpensive it was. And, in my opinion, they are still a incredible deal. Order your CatCam now: it is a great gadget for yourself or it makes a great unique, gift. Most orders have been from the UK, Germany and the USA.

Most people don’t have technical background so they buy the full unit. But he reports that some brave souls order a kit because of price or availability although they have not done anything similar before. What a great way to challenge yourself and, if you succeed, end up with a wonderful creation when you finish.

He is in discussion with several different groups to ramp up production. The main problem is that producing the device requires electronics, optics, software, mechanics and logistics expertise. So, for the time being, he continues to modify the cameras by hand because no investments are necessary and the production can be scaled according to the demand. The required soldering, electronics and system knowledge makes it a challenge to outsource. So, for now, CatCam production is adding to the USA manufacturing output total. He is also planning to produce more products.
photo of Jacquie the cat wearing a CatCam
JÃ¼rgen believes that getting the cat camera working was not that challenging. You can take a look at his explanation of how he did so to decide for yourself. He does admit that challenges do arise if you want to produce cameras for others. To do that you must create a product that is foolproof, reliable, and easy to use and manufacture.

“I was surprised how famous one can get with ‘boring’ technical engineering stuff. I like this not only for me but for all other engineers out there who daily work hard on challenges which others don’t even understand. We as engineers make the world moving but usually we are not recognized.” Everyone enjoys the products of the labors of engineers (such as cell phones, MP3 players, cars, planes, bridges, internet connections) but few see the required knowledge, work and the people that bring those products into being.
photo by Jacquie the cat of a vine
JÃ¼rgen “hopes that I made ‘engineering’ a bit more visible to people who did not think about it before, for example, female cat owners who never had a solder iron in the hand and bought plain SOIC chips because they wanted the cat camera…”

I think he has done a great job illustrating the engineering behind the CatCam and making engineering fun. And in so doing hopefully is making more people aware of the engineers that make so many wonderful modern gadgets. Go buy a CatCam now (and if you are adventurous buy the parts and create your own – you will learn a lot about what makes all your modern gadgets work). And then send in the pictures your cat takes so everyone can see the wonderful things engineers make possible.

The photos here show the results of several new cat photographers (Binky the cat [first 2 photos] and Jacquie the cat [last 2]). Only a small percentage of CatCam owners have shared there pictures so far.

Over the next few years he would like to learn to sail, visit Yellowstone national park, walk the Camino de Santiago again, move on to other international assignment (maybe far east) and continuing raising his two children.

The Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog is written by John Hunter and tracks a wide variety of developments, happenings, interesting under-publicized facts, and cool aspects of science and engineering.

Google Lunar X Prize

The Google Lunar Xprize

seeks to create a global private race to the Moon that excites and involves people around the world and, accelerates space exploration for the benefit of all humanity. The use of space has dramatically enhanced the quality of life and may ultimately lead to solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems that we face on earth – energy independence and climate change.
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we hope to usher in an era of commercial exploration and development, in which small companies, groups of individuals and universities can build, launch and explore the Moon and beyond.

Sergey Brin: “So now, we are here today embarking upon this great adventure of having a nongovernmental, commercial organization return to the Moon and explore. And I’m very excited that Google can play a part in it.”

Thousands of Spiders Build Huge Web

Thousands of spiders worked together to build huge web (site broke link so I removed it) by Anna Tinsley:

But Tuesday afternoon, thousands of Texas spiders were back at it, working to rebuild an immense spider web at Lake Tawakoni State Park that at one time stretched about 200 yards, covering bushes and trees to create a creepy canopy.

Researchers say they now believe thousands of spiders from different species worked together to make one huge web — much different from the traditional individual webs that would normally be woven. Together, they’ve built and rebuilt a web that has caught countless bugs and the attention of people nationwide. “These spiders seem to be working together to build it back,” said Zach Lewis, an office clerk at the park. “It’s really something to see.
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“It looked just like a spider would have jumped from tree to tree with a can of silly string.” Researchers say it likely took 1 1/2 to two months to weave such a large web.
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He found spiders from 12 families, with the most prevalent being from the Tetragnathidae family. Identified spiders were funnel web weavers, sac spiders, orb weavers, mesh web weavers, wolf spiders, pirate spiders, jumping spiders and long-jawed orb weavers, according to the researchers’ report.
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“With the amount of rain that has occurred this year and the huge food supply available, it just created the right condition for all of this,” he said. “It’s possible we’ll see it again. But this happened to be a year where the conditions were right.”

Google 3D Campus Competition

The seven winning teams
Purdue University – Depts of Computer Graphics Technology and Education, Concordia University
Loyola Campus – Dept of Civil Engineering
Stanford University – Dept of Architectural Design
Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne – Depts of Engineering and Computer Science
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering – Dept of Engineering
Dartmouth College – Depts of Computer Science and Digital Art
University of Minnesota – Dept of Architecture
of Google’s Build Your Campus in 3D Competition will get to visit Google’s Mountain View Headquarters. It is nice to see Google continue to provide opportunities for students.

Stanford team puts campus on map; wins Google Earth 3-D modeling contest – view the Standford buildings:

In addition to having their entries displayed on Google Earth, the winners were invited to the Google headquarters for four days, Aug. 6-9. They attended workshops, met with professional 3-D modelers, got a grand tour of the compound and enjoyed the famous free lunch.
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We’d initially planned to do nearly all the buildings on campus,” Lehrburger said. “But we underestimated the time it was going to take. I think we thought the learning curve was going to be a little bit better than it actually was, so we had to readjust our plans.”

Though they were proud of their final outcome and hard work—Lehrburger and Bergen worked late into the night as they got closer to deadline—neither of the team leaders was overly optimistic. They had modeled 94 out of the 300 or so buildings on campus and worried their model of Stanford would be considered incomplete.

Google contest motivates students to ‘rebuild’ WMU (Western Michigan University designs):

A group of seven WMU students answered an invitation by the Internet giant Google to participate in its Build Your Campus in 3-D Competition. The teams’ submission placed among the top 30 out of some 350 entries from across the United States and Canada and will be incorporated on Google Earth, the company’s popular geographic information feature.

Mission to Mars

This post was submitted by Richard Lachman, via our post suggestion form.

Race to Mars is a huge Discovery Channel Canada project that tries to present the most scientifically accurate vision of a human mission to Mars possible. With input from over 175 Scientists, the 4-hour mini-series uses Hollywood effects to illustrate a scientifically grounded mission-plan. There’s also a 6-hour documentary series on the science, and a major education/outreach project online. The website includes free downloadable 3D games and web-games that blend riveting game play with science-inspired subject material. We’re using Serious Games to educate without being completely didactic, and we include curriculum-based science material to back up our content.

It is indeed a resource worth checking out. Related: Mars Rover – NASA Engineering Challenges – Immense Amount of Ice Found on Mars

Buckminster Fuller $100,000 Challenge

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge seeks submissions of design science solutions within a broad range of human endeavor that exemplify the trimtab principle. Trimtabs demonstrate how small amounts of energy and resources precisely applied at the right time and place can produce maximum advantageous change.

Solutions should be:

* Comprehensive — a clear demonstration of holistic systems thinking.
* Anticipatory — projectively tracking critical trends and needs; identifying and assessing long term consequences of proposed solutions.
* Ecologically responsible — reflective and supportive of nature’s underlying processes, patterns and principles.
* Verifiable — able to withstand rigorous empirical testing.
* Replicable — capable of being readily undertaken by others.
* Achievable — likely to be implemented successfully and broadly adopted.

How to enter

Nanotechnology Breakthroughs for Computer Chips

Nano On Off Switch

Photo: Actual scanning tunneling microscopy images of the naphthalocyanine molecule in the “on” and the “off” state. More images

IBM Unveils Two Major Nanotechnology Breakthroughs as Building Blocks for Atomic Structures and Devices

IBM scientists have made major progress in probing a property called magnetic anisotropy in individual atoms. This fundamental measurement has important technological consequences because it determines an atom’s ability to store information. Previously, nobody had been able to measure the magnetic anisotropy of a single atom.

With further work it may be possible to build structures consisting of small clusters of atoms, or even individual atoms, that could reliably store magnetic information. Such a storage capability would enable nearly 30,000 feature length movies or the entire contents of YouTube – millions of videos estimated to be more than 1,000 trillion bits of data – to fit in a device the size of an iPod. Perhaps more importantly, the breakthrough could lead to new kinds of structures and devices that are so small they could be applied to entire new fields and disciplines beyond traditional computing.

In the second report, IBM researchers unveiled the first single-molecule switch that can operate flawlessly without disrupting the molecule’s outer frame — a significant step toward building computing elements at the molecular scale that are vastly smaller, faster and use less energy than today’s computer chips and memory devices.

In addition to switching within a single molecule, the researchers also demonstrated that atoms inside one molecule can be used to switch atoms in an adjacent molecule, representing a rudimentary logic element. This is made possible partly because the molecular framework is not disturbed.

Richard Palmer on Engineering and Innovation

Q and A: Richard Palmer interview

Palmer: d3o is a soft, flexible material that combines properties associated with liquids and enables them in solids. Normally the study of mechanics of materials in solids is entirely different to the study of fluids and what I have done is combine the two. The fluid properties that are incorporated in d3o allow it to be stretchable, soft, to flow and to feel comfortable. But in an impact, that fluid turns into an elastomer and everything locks together to dissipate, spread and absorb the impact.

CNN: Can you go into the applications of that?
Palmer: You can use d3o in sportswear where you want freedom of movement and dexterity but also want some impact absorption. It’s in footwear, headwear, gloves, clothing and boots.

It means people can get on with their sport without being confounded by pieces of bulky, rigid plastic and cumbersome, stiff foams. It’s the difference between Robocop and Spiderman. Robocop is built with protection around him like a shield; d3o is more like Spiderman, where the protection and the athlete are integrated together. It’s a discrete, small and totally unrestricted layer of protection in the areas where you need it that wouldn’t previously have been possible.

CNN: What advice would you give someone who wanted to become an innovator?
Palmer: Open your eyes to both creative and analytical thinking. Scientists aren’t just boffins; creatives aren’t just mad lunatics. There’s a huge opportunity to dovetail the two. And follow something you believe in.