Online Cortex Thoughts on Science and Technology

Looking back, I am surprised at how electronics has quietly advanced to the point where we can buy small programmable computers on chips for a dollar or two.  These are microcontrollers of course, and in my lab we are working on programming them to handle the tedious tasks in our robotics projects.

At makezine.com, I stumbled on this gem of a book titled “Making Things Talk”

It is packed with 26 electronics projects that involve getting these tiny computers to talk to each other and the internet over both wired and wireless connections.  I have ordered all the requisite parts, and when purchased, they amount to around $280.  I am looking forward to summer vacation when I get to go through each of these projects one-by-one:

1. Making a computer “mouse” out of a stuffed animal monkey and flex sensors.
2. Making the monkey wireless
3. Negotiating in Bluetooth with the BlueSMiRF module
4. Setting up a networked webcam
5. Connecting a microcontroller to the internet without a computer
6. Networked Air Quality Meter
7. Networked Games
8. Infrared Communication
9. Radio Communication
10. Duplex Radio Communication
11. Bluetooth Communication
12. Broadcasting Messaging
13. Directed Messaging
14. Infrared Rangefinding
15. Ultrasonic Rangefinding
16. Reading Signal Strength with XBee Radios
17. Reading Signal Strength with Bluetooth Radios
18. Reading the GPS Serial Protocol
19. Heading with a Digital Compass
20. Attitude with an Accelerometer
21. Color Recognition with a Webcam
22. 2D Barcode Recognition with a Webcam
23. Reading RFID Tags
24. RFID and Home Automation
25. IP Geocoding
26. Email from RFID

OK, I wont be making each of these.  I will get an idea halfway through and take off and work on that.  But it should be fun!

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY
 

Posted under Coding, Entrepreneurship, Evolution, Exploration, Fun, Gadgets, Information, Intelligent Systems, Internet, Inventions, Research, Robotics, Technology

The current issue of the IEEE Spectrum Insider has a video interview with Dean Kamen founder of DEKA Research (and inventor of the segway, iBOT, and founder of the FIRST robotics competitions).  He answers five questions on the future of robotics, the hype surrounding the segway, and education.

Watch Dean Kamen’s interview here.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

Posted under Entrepreneurship, Inventions, Research, Robotics, Technology

Dean Kamen, an engineer was on The Colbert Report last night discussion his latest invention: the Vapor Compression Distiller.  This device takes dirty or salinated water and produces clean fresh water. The distiller is produced by Dean Kamen’s engineering compand Deka Research, and they are aiming to distribute it world-wide to help solve ongoing and future water shortage distasters.

While I do not know precisely how this distiller works, in general a distiller would boil the water, collect the steam in baffles and let it condense into water and flow out of the machine. 

Dean Kamen claims that this machine cleans all forms of dirty water.  I am not sure how this is possible without membranes or filters.  Any volatiles in the water with a boiling point less than or equal to that off water will boil off and possibly be collected in the baffles.

Regardless, it is an impressive machine as it will save thousands of lives.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY 

Posted under Entrepreneurship, Inventions, Technology

I have just submitted my first Google Gadget.
It is called Bird of the Day, and it simply presents a photo of a new bird species each day. The photo is a public domain image from Wikipedia, and I link back to it so that you can get more information.

Here it is:

You can put it on your iGoogle page by clicking here…

I am going to write a few other versions that will complement my BirdPlanner.com site. The first will be a modification of the above where the user can enter their latitude and longitude to get birds that are present in that locale. That way people can prepare for their birdwatching trips.

I will also try writing one which is a Bird Identification Quiz. It will be a multiple choice quiz. I can vary the difficulty by sampling from birds of the same genus, from the same family, or from the whole set of birds.

This is a fun way for me to become familiar with the computational technology. The google gadget is just an XML file. The tag <Module> identifies it as a Google Gadget.

The remaining XML has three parts:

1. <ModulePrefs>, which encodes the properties of the gadget.
2. <UserPref>, which encodes the user information.
3. <Content>, which encodes the content.

My gadget is pretty straightforward.  There are no User Preferences, so I just have the first and last sections. 

You can look at the xml code here.  You will see that the workhorse of the content section is a php file that emits an html file.  In this case the gadget simply holds a simple web page.

In the future, I will write more details about how all of this works.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

Posted under Biology, Birds, Coding, Gadgets, Inventions, Software

Sarcos is a company that specializes in robotic systems.  They have been working to develop exoskeletons that will give ordinary people super-human strength.  The age of the super-hero and super-villian is upon us!

The video below shows their exoskeleton in action:

Posted under Inventions, Research, Robotics, Technology