We've always liked how Parrot manages to take some of the latest research-inspired technology and stuff it into its affordable (and fun!) consumer robots. Two new robots showed up at CES this year, sporting some capabilities that, until now, we've only spotted in research labs: there's an awesome little wheeled robot with a clever jumping mechanism, along with a new quadcopter that comes with a pair of giant wheels that allow it to move along the groundwhile doubling as a sort of protective roll cage.
Get in on the ground floor as we look at the most exciting crowdfunded tech projects out there right now. This week: Heatworks, an alternative to the traditional water heater that promises not only previously unknown longevity but also a replacement for the mechanical flow switch and new, state-of-the-art electrodes that should deliver instant, super-accurate temperature adjustments.
Traditional water heating equipment uses fuel as an energy source to heat a rod-like element in the water tank. The element then warms the water.
If you've ever reheated a hot beverage by placing it in the microwave, you'll have an idea as to the alternatives. Microwave ovens heat liquids by moving molecules so that the molecules hit each other. This action creates heat -- a bit like rubbing your hands on a cold day.
ISI's Heatworks Model 1 water heater, a project looking for funding on Kickstarter at the moment, pitches itself somewhere in between these two existing technologies.
ISI's product uses electronics to directly energize water molecules instead of using a heating element rod, the company says. In other words, the appliance is designed to use water's natural resistance to heat itself.
Technical Details
Graphite electrodes -- rather than a traditional convective heating element -- are installed in an efficient, tankless water heater. Existing tankless water heaters are generally more efficient than water heaters with tanks because only the required water is heated; tanks heat more than is needed.
The acoustically quiet graphite electrodes in ISI's tank produce two gallons of hot water per minute, and tanks can be installed in series.
The tank measures 12 1/2 inches long by 6 inches in diameter and weighs about 16 lbs.
A WiFi module is planned that will allow for remote measurement and control of power and temperature.
Tagline: "Your next water heater."
The Numbers
ISI Technology currently has more than 300 backers for its water heater project pledging more than US$80,000 of a $125,000 goal. The funding period ends Feb. 16, 2014.
A pledge of $225 gets you a Heatworks Model 1. Note that a $395 retail price is proposed for the final product. Estimated delivery is in May 2014.
The Upsides
Theoretically, this equipment should provide efficiencies -- not least because minerals in water bind themselves to the heating rods in classic heaters, thus reducing rod life. If there's no rod, the heater should last longer.
The arguments in favor of this product are compelling, and if you've ever had to call a plumber to replace a failing domestic water heater for no apparent reason -- the rods have in fact gotten gunked-up with plating deposits, or have burnt out -- you'll know what we mean.
This water heater promises to introduce previously unknown longevity into this arena. Plus, the traditional water heater hasn't changed much, in technological terms, since the days of pot-on-fire.
What we haven't seen before is a replacement for the mechanical flow switch -- which ISI promises to deliver through microprocessors -- or new, state-of-the-art electrodes that should deliver instant, super-accurate temperature adjustments. Then, too, there's smartphone interactivity, which this product also promises.
The Downsides
The creator needs to be a bit clearer about exactly how its product "directly energizes and heats the water molecule," as opposed to simply heating water ultra-super-efficiently through use of graphite and microprocessors with split-second accuracy. Or is this just marketing gobbledygook?
No annual maintenance and a 3-year warranty is a lofty promise.
While we don't have any reason to doubt ISI's claims, prototyping and testing, we'd like to see some more concrete numbers before ripping out our existing water heating kit and replacing it with this gear -- seductive though it is.
The Conclusion
Graphite electrode technology is commonly used in arc furnace steel manufacturing. It's an efficient, responsive technology that can provide high levels of heat along with good electrical conductivity. We look forward to hearing how this rapidly financing Kickstarter project plays out in real-world use.
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| Researchers have invented world's fastest, and cheapest thin-film organic transistors. |
This new technology has the potential to achieve the high performance needed for high-resolution TV screens and similar electronic devices in an inexpensive way, said the researchers.
Engineers from University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and Stanford University created thin-film organic transistors that could operate more than five times faster than previous examples of this experimental technology.
The team led by Zhenan Bao, professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, and Jinsong Huang, assistant professor of mechanical and materials engineering at UNL, used the process to make cheaper organic thin-film transistors with electronic characteristics comparable to those found in expensive, curved-screen TV displays based on silicon technology.
They achieved their speed boost by altering the basic process for making thin film organic transistors, said the study published in the journal Nature Communications.
The researchers called this improved method 'off-centre spin coating'.
Even at this initial stage, 'off-centre spin coating' produced transistors with a range of speeds far above those of previous organic semiconductors and comparable to the performance of thepolysilicon materials used in today's high-end electronics, claimed the study.
Further improvements to this experimental process could lead to the development of inexpensive, high-performance electronics built on transparent substrates such as glass and, eventually, clear and flexible plastics, the study said.
The Brooklyn-based 3D printing company introduces new models, including the Makerbot Replicator Mini and Z18.
Bre Pettis at CES 2014
Like a showman, he removed a black covering to reveal a mammoth 3D printer. And it's for making big, epic things, he said. The CEO announced the Replicator Z18 for printing large objects -- up to 12 by 12 by 18 inches tall.
"If you've been hampered with how big you can make things, then no more," said Pettis. The industrial strength printer was one of three new models he unveiled today. The other two are a new Replicator "prosumer" machine, and a Replicator Mini.
The idea of the press conference was simple: try to make something for everyone.
"It's not, are you going to get a 3D printer, it's which Makerbot printer are you going to get?" he said.
Price-wise, the Mini is $1,399, the new Replicator is $2,899, and the big bot Z18 is $6,499. While the Mini is intended to be the entry-level machine, it's still on the pricier side at more than a grand. All three machines will tap into the Makerbot 3D printing platform. Pettis touted the Mini's one-touch printing capability, Wi-Fi connectivity, and camera. It also has a new "smart extruder" that snaps on to the device magnetically.
The company also announced a line of apps that includes a desktop app with MakerWare printing software, a direct integration with Makerbot's online sharing community, Thingiverse, and the ability for a user to organize his or her designs with a cloud library. Pettis also announced a Makerbot mobile app for iOS.
Some other announcements from the presentation: Pettis introduced the Makerbot digital store, a new retail front end where people can buy high-quality designs made by pros. For example, one collection is called Chunky Trucks, a set of toy construction vehicles and workers. He also announced a partnership with SoftKinetic, a 3D sensor company, though other details were scant.
For many, Makerbot has become the de facto steward of 3D printing, with an outspoken CEO and a slick flagship store in New York City. The company, founded in 2009 by Pettis, was acquired in June by Stratasys for $403 million. Pettis boasts that there are more than 44,000 Makerbots in the world. The company has a number of other projects going, including Robo-Hand, which allows for 3D printing of prosthetic for children.
Though the technology has been around for some time, 3D has had quite the coming out party recently. It stoked controversy when the world's first fully 3D printed gun was made last May. Other companies like Shapeways, a 3D printing marketplace, have gotten the attention of investors like Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm. And just like any good flag bearers for a nascent technology, Makerbot is leading the didactic push toward ubiquity -- recently announcing that it hopes to get 3D printers into every school.
Image: Parrot
Software redistributes tasks among networked data centers to optimize energy efficiency
The computing cloud may feel intangible to users, but it has a definite physical form and a corresponding carbon footprint. Facebook’s data centers, for example, were responsible for the emission of 298 000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2012, the equivalent of roughly 55 000 cars on the road. Computer scientists at Trinity College Dublin and IBM Research Dublin have shown that there are ways to reduce emissions from cloud computing, although their plan would likely cause some speed reductions and cost increases. By developing a group of algorithms, collectively called Stratus, the team was able to model a worldwide network of connected data centers and predict how best to use them to keep carbon emissions low while still getting the needed computing done and data delivered.
“The overall goal of the work was to see load coming from different parts of the globe [and] spread it out to different data centers to achieve objectives like minimizing carbon emissions or having the lowest electricity costs,” saysDonal O’Mahony, a computer science professor at Trinity.
For the simulation, the scientists modeled a scenario inspired by Amazon’sElastic Compute Cloud (EC2) data center setup that incorporated three key variables—carbon emissions, cost of electricity, and the time needed for computation and data transfer on a network. Amazon EC2 has data centers in Ireland and the U.S. states of Virginia and California, so the experimental model placed data centers there too, and it used queries from 34 sources in different parts of Europe, Canada, and the United States as tests.
The researchers then used the Stratus algorithms to optimize the workings of the network for any of the three variables. With the algorithms they were able to reduce the EC2 cloud’s emissions by 21 percent over a common commercial scheme for balancing computing loads. The key to the reduction, scientists found, was in routing requests to the Irish data center more than to those in California or Virginia. Ireland also tended to have faster-than-average service request times, so even when Stratus was tuned to reduce carbon, it shaved 38 milliseconds off the average time taken to request and receive a response from the data centers.
The researchers stress that the results have more value in representing trends than in predicting real-world numbers for quantities like carbon savings. Some of the key inputs were necessarily inexact. As an example, for some geographic locations, such as Ireland, it was easy to find real-time carbon intensity data or real-time electricity pricing data, but in other areas, including the United States, only seasonal or annual averages were available. “If we had the real-time data for California and Virginia, the simulations might look quite different,” says Joseph Doyle, a networks researcher at Trinity who worked with O’Mahony and IBM’s Robert Shroten on Stratus.
Christopher Stewart, who researches sustainable cloud computing at Ohio State University, says that although Stratus and other recent work have made significant progress toward modeling effective load balancing, data storage is another important factor [PDF] to consider. In order to handle requests, you have to have data stored on-site, he says. “With data growing rapidly, storage capacity is a major concern now, too, and that may limit your flexibility in terms of being able to route requests from one data center to another.”
The researchers hope that the easier it is to achieve load balancing and optimization in cloud computing, the more it will be implemented by environmentally conscious companies, or those just looking to save money. “A company like Twitter might have lots of options in how it decides that all the Twitter traffic is going to get served around the world,” O’Mahony says. “If they decided that greenness was one of the things that was most important to them, they could structure their load balancing accordingly. Or if getting it done as cheaply as possible was important, they could structure it that way. Or they could do anything in the middle.”
This article originally appeared in print as "Reducing the Carbon Cost of Cloud Computing."
A MEMS microgyroscope mimics a 19th-century instrument's mechanism to boost abilities of inertial guidance systems
Photo: Alexander Trusov/University of California, Irvine
1 February 2011—A new type of microscopic gyroscope could lead to better inertial guidance systems for missiles, better rollover protection in automobiles, and balance-restoring implants for the elderly.
Researchers from the MicroSystems Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), described what they’re calling a Foucault pendulum on a chip at last week’s IEEE 2011 conference on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) in Cancun, Mexico. A Foucault pendulum is a large but simple mechanism used to demonstrate Earth’s rotation. The device the UCI engineers built is a MEMS gyroscope made of silicon that is capable of directly measuring angles faster and more accurately than current MEMS-based gyroscopes.
”Historically it has been very pie-in-the-sky to do something like this,” says Andrei Shkel, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCI.
Today’s MEMS gyroscopes don’t measure angles directly. Instead, they measure angular velocity, then perform a calculation to figure out the actual angle. When something is in motion, such as a spinning missile, keeping track of its orientation requires many measurements and calculations, and each new calculation introduces more error. Shkel says his gyroscope is more accurate because it measures the angle directly and skips the calculation. ”You’re pretty much eliminating one step,” he says.
The gyroscope works on the same principle as does the Foucault’s pendulum you’d find in many museums, demonstrating Earth’s spin. The plane on which the pendulum oscillates stays in one position relative to the fixed stars in the sky, but its path over the floor gradually rotates as the world turns. Similarly, the oscillation of a mass in the gyroscope stays the same with respect to the universe at large, while the gyroscope spins around it.
Of course, the pendulum in Shkel’s two-dimensional device is not a bob on a string. Instead, four small masses of silicon a few hundred micrometers wide sit at the meeting point of two silicon springs that are at right angles to each other. A small electric current starts the mass vibrating in unison. As the gyroscope spins, the direction of the vibrational energy precesses the same way a swinging pendulum would.
The gyroscope operates with a bandwidth of 100 hertz and has a dynamic range of 450 degrees per second, meaning it detects as much as a rotation and a quarter in that time. Many conventional microgyroscopes (at least those of the ”mode matching” variety) operate at only 1 to 10 Hz and have a range of only 10 degrees per second. But inertial guidance systems—such as those that stabilize an SUV when it hits a curb or keep a rapidly spinning missile on track—require both high dynamic range and high-measurement bandwidth to accurately and quickly measure directional changes in such moving objects.
Shkel described and patented the concept for a chip-scale Foucault pendulum back in 2002, but the device’s architecture requires such precise balance among its elements that it is too hard to manufacture, even nine years later. But last week, Shkel’s colleague Alexander Trusov presented a new design, which Shkel says is more complicated in concept but easier to make, requiring standard silicon processes and only a single photolithographic mask.
But it’s just one possible design. Shkel is on leave from his academic post and currently working with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has launched a program to create angle-measuring gyroscopes for better inertial guidance systems. Three-dimensional designs that use concepts other than the one behind his 2-D device might be preferable for DARPA’s needs because they’ll take up less space, Shkel says. He hopes the DARPA program will also improve manufacturing processes in general, giving conventional microgyroscopes higher precision for applications that don’t require the bandwidth and dynamic range of a chip-scale Foucault pendulum.
”We will have a new class of devices,” he says, ”but we will also help existing devices.”
Northrop Grumman’s MQ-4C Triton unmanned aircraft system. Photo: Alan Radecki/Northrop Grumman
A new drone with the mammoth wingspan of a Boeing 757 is set to give the U.S. Navy some serious surveillance power.
Northrop Grumman and the Navy say they’ve just completed the ninth flight trial of the Triton unmanned aircraft system (UAS), an improvement upon its predecessor in the Air Force, the Global Hawk.
With its 130-foot wingspan, Triton will provide high-altitude, real-time intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) from a sensor suite that supplies a 360-degree view at a radius of over 2,000 nautical miles, allowing monitoring from higher and farther away than any of its competitors.
But should a closer look be necessary, unique de-icing and lightning protection capabilities allow Triton to plunge through the clouds to get a closer view and automatically classify ships. And in recent tests, the drone was able to easily recover from perturbations in its flight path caused by turbulence.
Although Triton has a higher degree of autonomy than the most autonomous drones, operators on the ground will be able to obtain high-resolution imagery, use radar for target detection and provide information-sharing capabilities to other military units.
Thus far, Triton has completed flights up to 9.4 hours at altitudes of 50,000 feet at the company’s manufacturing facility in Palmdale, California. According to Northrop Grumman, Triton could support missions up to 24 hours.
Northrop Grumman reported earlier that Triton had demonstrated structural strength of the drone’s wing — a key capability that will allow the aircraft to descend from high altitudes to make positive identification of targets during surveillance missions — even when it was subjected to a load at 22 percent above the Navy’s requirement.
“During surveillance missions using Triton, Navy operators may spot a target of interest and order the aircraft to a lower altitude to make positive identification,” said Mike Mackey, Northrop Gumman’s Triton UAS program director, in a statement. “The wing’s strength allows the aircraft to safely descend, sometimes through weather patterns, to complete this maneuver.”
Under an initial contract of $1.16 billion in 2008, the Navy has ordered 68 of the MQ-4C Triton drones with expected delivery in 2017 — a slip from the initial anticipated date of December 2015.
