Online Cortex Thoughts on Science and Technology

As reported on PCSTATS, Research in Motion (RIM) engineer Matthias Wendel designed a Lego Machine to test their Blackberry Pagers.  The machine rotates the pager about two axes in a pre-programmed manner allowing the engineer to systematically test the reception of the 900 MHz wireless device in the environment.

This is an excellent example of how LEGO machines can be used to solve real engineering problems on the cheap!

Image Copyright: Matthias Wendel

Kevin Knuth
Albany, NY

Posted under Intelligent Systems, Inventions, Lego, NXT, Robotics

I just received a notice that EarthPortal.org will be launching on Friday April 27, 2007.  Apparently, it will be a news portal where hundreds of scientists will contribute on anything EARTH.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

Posted under Climate, Energy, Internet

I recently learned that there is work being performed to develop GoogleSky.  GoogleSky will be the equivalent of Google Earth but for all things astronomical.  It will allow us to easily peruse and search the massive datasets that have been collected from the various space missions.  Such a venture would be a great asset to scientific research, but it would also help bring what we know about this glorious universe to the non-specialist as well.

This proposal was announced at ADASS 2006 in Tucson in December 2006 and can be found here.
But apparently it is going forward since they are still looking for people to work on it.  For example, here at the Space Telescope Science Institute through the Google Summer of Code.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

Posted under Astronomy, Internet, Research, Software, Space

I am slowly constructing my first intelligent instrument.  It will be an instrument that learns the acoustic radiation pattern emitted by a speaker.  It is not a perfect acoustic experiment—nor is it meant to be.  Uncertainties and errors abound, especially since I am using the Lego NXT Mindstorms system to construct the instrument.

The design is sufficiently complex that I found that I need to document it using the LDraw system, specifically MLCAD.  I have been practicing my animation skills as well.  Here you can see a short animation of the central drive shaft for the acoustic platform.  The gears are turning at the appropriate rates and everything.  However, there is an aliasing effect in this downsampled image (which used to be referred to as the wagon wheel effect).  So it may look as if some gears are rotating backwards, or not at all.  If you click on the image, you can download a 6 MB version that is much smoother. 

The longer animation will appear in two talks I am giving at the University at Albany this week:
NTIR 2007 and PASCAL 2006.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

Posted under Acoustics, Intelligent Systems, Inventions, Lego, NXT, Research, Robotics, Software

The NASA Vision Workbench (VW) is a general purpose image processing and computer vision library developed by Matt Hancher and colleagues from the Autonomous Systems and Robotics (ASR) Area in the Intelligent Systems Division at the NASA Ames Research Center.  The VW website has all the necessary installation information as well as the documentation titled The Vision Workbook.  But be sure to check their site to make sure that you have the latest version.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

Posted under Computation, Intelligent Systems, Note to Self, Research, Robotics, Software