The Swedish company plans to commercialize a color-changing disposable wristband that changes from yellow to pink based on increasing exposure to UV rays. You’ll know that it’s time to get out of the sun, in other words, when the yellow wristband turns pink. The wristband, developed by researchers at the University of Strathclyde, features an acid release agent that picks up UV rays along with a dye that changes in response to pH levels--so when the rays increase, acid is released and the dye changes the wristband’s color.You’ll know that it’s time to get out of the sun when the yellow wristband turns pink.
Intellego is working on an array of wristbands that work for different skin types. The Daily Mail reports that there will be one wristband for people with fair skin and lighter hair, another for people with dark skin and dark hair, so that your wrist alert signals you at the exact right time.
We’d suggest adding in wristbands that also take into account sunscreen use--a person with fair skin and light hair won’t absorb as many UV rays if they’re wearing high SPF sunscreen. Another caveat: The kind of person who would wear a wristband like this is probably already cautious about sun exposure.
The wristband is expected to go on sale in Spring 2013.
Freedom Sleeve
FreedomPop is the nation's first wireless Internet provider committed to eliminating the digital divide, delivering 100% free 4G mobile broadband Internet access, connecting consumer devices virtually anywhere at anytime. FreedomPop has joined with leading mobile broadband networks to deliver the speed and flexibility of fast high speed internet for free.
Product Features
Get 4G on your iPod - up to 15x faster than 3G
Stream music and videos on your iPod anywhere
Use Apple's FaceTime wherever you go
Get 100% FREE wifi for up to 8 devices
Service Features
500MB FREE broadband every month
Get up to 1GB FREE broadband by referring friends
Buy additional capacity for the lowest rates in the industry
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Specifications:
Name: iPod Touch Sleeve
Model: IMW-C870W
Color: Black
Finish: Matte
Dimensions: 61mm x 114mm x 15mm
Weight: 70g
Key design features
Feels like holding an iPhone
Volume and power control from device
Access to iPod power even while using Freedom Sleeve
6 Hours+ battery life
Mini USB for powering device
Read More
Volume and power control from device
Access to iPod power even while using Freedom Sleeve
6 Hours+ battery life
Mini USB for powering device
Read More
Dedicated parking spaces are always useful for city dwellers with cars; there’s nothing worse than coming home after a long day at work only to find that the nearest spot is 10 blocks away. But parking spaces take up, well, space. And for much of the day, they’re left unused. There’s one startup, Parkatmyhouse, that lets people rent out their empty spots. Designer Aaron Cheng has a more creative solution: a structure that looks like a normal parking garage during the day, but turns into a living space at night.
The Parking + Housing project, submitted to this year’s James Dyson Award, asks us to imagine a place where people don’t have many possessions and don’t mind losing access to their homes during the day.
Once evening hits (and presumably all the cars have exited), the parking garage inflates into small studio living spaces that are each divided into two parts: a fixed unit with storage, a bathroom, and a kitchen, and a separate bedroom that inflates and deflates using a pneumatic system. All furniture--and other furnishings--would have to be stuffed into the fixed area during the day.
Sure, there are holes in the design: Where do people park when they get home? And what happens if someone wants to stay home from work? This would only work for someone who needs a place to rest their head at night, and nothing more.
But consider this: Cities around the world are growing rapidly, and will only continue to balloon as the population grows. Already, urban centers are considering creative space-saving ideas. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg recently launched a contest for developers who want to build a series of 275- to 300-square-foot apartments. Developers in San Francisco are working on similar ideas.
A part-time parking lot, part-time home may not be the logical next step. But it’s something to consider.
What is GiraDora project ?
GiraDora, a leg-powered washing and drying device, makes it easier, faster, and safer to wash clothes.GiraDora is the world's first human-powered washer and spin dryer designed specifically for people living on $4-10 per day to increase efficiency and improve the experience of hand-washing clothes. Its innovative design combats several health problems such as chronic lower back pain, tenosynovitis, and respiratory problems such as Asthma associated with mold. It also allows the user to begin to break the cycle of poverty by providing income generating solutions.
GiraDora is a blue bucket that conceals a spinning mechanism that washes clothes and then partially dries them. It’s operated by a foot pedal, while the user sits on the lid to stabilize the rapidly churning contents. Sitting alleviates lower-back pain associated with hand-washing clothes, and frees up the washer to pursue other tasks. It’s portable, so it can be placed nearby a water source, or even inside on a rainy day. It reduces health risks like joint problems, skin irritation, and mold inhalation. Most importantly, it uses far less water and cleans clothes faster than conventional hand-washing.
The Instagram for video movement just got a little more interesting with social 60-second video sharing platform Ptch.
Ptch picks up where your static photo feeds on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Viddy, Facebook, and Google+ leave off.
Dreamworks, the animation studio behind Ice Age, is backing the iOS app, which launches today and lets users create, edit, and share 60-second mini-movies from their own photos and video clips. Then comes the movie magic. Ptch helps users add title cards, offers soundtrack help with one of more than 80 preloaded songs, and even integrates comments from your social networks. Like other outfits that do Instagram-like treatments for video, Ptch lets mini-movie makers wrap their creations in one of eight styles. You can share new creations on Ptch, as well as on your desired social channels.
Then things get interesting.
Pitch lets you reshape your friends' Ptches--Ptch calls it "living media." For example, if you and a friend both attended the same concert but took videos and photos of different scenes, your friend could create a Ptch that you could then edit as you please--perhaps by adding your own concert photos, or changing the song--before sharing it again.
Ptch attempts to simplify the video editing process to the point where creating a mashup shouldn't take much longer than the 60 seconds you spend watching it.
Leonard oversees 15 full-time employees. A third of them are former DreamWorks staffers--the company is the venture's sole backer--who took paycuts (in exchange for stock) to come over to Ptch. The rest come from outside of the film industry and includes former MySpace and Yahoo executives, as well as serial entrepreneurs.
Ptch will launch as a free app for now, with premium add-ons to come in the future. Those add-ons will include more songs and new styles that developers and users alike will be able to sell in an open marketplace, not unlike Tumblr's theme garden, except premium styles will only cost around 20 cents each. Leonard says he expects the vast majority of people will use Ptch for free, but he hopes to follow the Zynga model where even getting a small percentage of users to pay for premium content translates into meaningful profits, just thanks to the sheer scale of users.
In the long term, Ptch eventually wants to integrate users' music libraries to make the experience more personal, as well as license short flim clips that people will be able to purchase--again, "for pennies," Leonard says--to include in their Ptches. The idea is these short, instantly recognizable clips would be novelties for users and provide new revenue streams for the license-holding studios who aren't making any money from such clips.
But Ptch's biggest selling point--DreamWorks' know-how, clout, and resources--is also a potential sore spot. DreamWorks has played the role of tech incubator for several years, but not always successfully. In 1999, CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and other moguls including Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard announced a new site called Pop.com, one of Hollywood's earlier forays into online video. Pop.com would showcase short-form web content created by famous flimmakers--in essence, it should have been the dot-com era's version of today's YouTube channels. The venture, largely shunned by Hollywood's Internet skeptics, failed to launch, but not before blowing through $8 million in funding. Pop.com's fate--along with those of other similarly-minded app attempts that have failed, such as Color, the much-hyped photo-sharing app--serve as cautionary tales for Ptch and Leonard.
Which means Ptch has to prove it's delivering a high-quality product that demonstrating staying power in the crowded-to-bursting social content arena to convince DreamWorks, as well as new backers in the future. Currently, Ptch doesn't vastly improve on existing services like Viddy. Ptch won't start to get really interesting until it pulls in truly standout features, such as those short famous film clips or integration with your personal music library.
DronesForPeace provides the key capabilities of a surveillance drone at a world changing price; $100 drones distributed in bulk by journalists to crowdsource the video coverage of a natural or political disaster. DronesForPeace proliferates aerial video in the same way cell phone cameras provided the story on the ground in recent events like the Arab spring. Like a robotic carrier pigeon, we carry the footage miles away from the conflict to those who can spread the message.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)--or drones--have been used in the U.S. for over 50 years, largely for military purposes. It makes sense; drones can be used for surveillance and fighting enemies without putting pilots at risk. But there are plenty of uses for unmanned camera-equipped drones outside of the military, including documenting protest situations, monitoring fertilizer applications and water distribution on farms, and just taking pretty pictures.
Drones for Peace, a project currently working its way through the MassChallenge accelerator program, wants to bring these drones to the masses. The ultimate goal is a drone for aerial photography that sells for just $100.
This is the first project for Rotary Robotics, a company that may eventually launch a whole line of drones for different applications. This first $100 drone is meant for general use. "We are engineers who were working in the military UAV space for awhile. We wanted to a create an aerial surveillance aircraft that was cheap enough that it would be accessible to everyone," says cofounder James Peverill.
And so they did. The prototype drone is about a pound, has a two-foot wingspan, and can travel at 20 to 30 knots. It’s simple enough to use that anyone could launch it to gather aerial photos without having any knowledge of how to navigate UAVs. That’s because there’s no human navigation involved--a smartphone app lets users select points on a map that they want to photograph, and the drone automatically launches itself, takes the picture, and comes back.
The ultra-expensive drones on the market have data links to the ground, but maintaining that link can be challenging and expensive, so Rotary Robotics decided to nix a link altogether. "There’s really no interactive control. Once the drone is out there doing its thing, it’s following a pre-planned mission, but you can take as many photos as you want," says Peverill. He anticipates that the consumer-ready version of the drone will be able take a number of photos around a specified point before returning.
Rotary only has a proof of concept at the moment, but Peverill expects to launch a Kickstarter campaign in the near future. Initially, the drone will probably cost somewhere in the range of $200 to $250, with prices eventually dropping to $100.
Rotary is also visiting with potential users, including a tech-savvy farmer in New Hampshire who has previously worked with balloon and kite photography. "He’s really excited," says Peverill. "He’s interested in UAVs but didn’t have the expertise or budget."
And as for the non-farmers among us? We will soon be able to send our drones out to cover the latest round of police confrontations at Occupy Wall Street protests without getting pepper-sprayed.
The eye-tracking devices and "smart" software, which costs less than 40 pounds, can help patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, muscular dystrophy and spinal cord to interact with the computer freely.
According to a study, published in The Journal of Neural Engineering, the device could even allow people to control an electronic wheelchair simply by looking where they want to go or control a robotic prosthetic arm.
Composed from off-the-shelf materials, the new device can work out exactly where a person is looking by tracking their eye movements, allowing them to control a cursor on a screen just like a normal computer mouse.
Researchers from Imperial College London demonstrated its functionality by getting a group of people to play the classic computer game Pong without any kind of handset. Users were also able to browse the web and write emails "hands-off,"
Aldo Faisal, a lecturer in neurotechnology at Imperial's Department of Bioengineering, is confident in the ability to utilise eye movements given that six of the subjects, who had never used their eyes as a control input before, could still register a respectable score within 20 per cent of the able-bodied users after just 10 minutes of using the device for the first time.
The commercially viable device uses just one watt of power and can transmit data wirelessly over Wi-Fi or via USB into any computer.
The GT3D system has also solved the 'Midas touch problem', allowing users to click on an item on the screen using their eyes, instead of a mouse button.
"Crucially, we have achieved two things: We have built a 3D eye tracking system hundreds of times cheaper than commercial systems and used it to build a real-time brain machine interface that allows patients to interact more smoothly and more quickly than existing invasive technologies
that are tens of thousands of times more expensive," he said.
"This is frugal innovation. Developing smarter software and piggy-backing existing hardware to create devices that can help people worldwide independent of their health care circumstances."
The cameras constantly take pictures of the eye, working out where the pupil is pointing, and from this, the researchers can use a set of calibrations to work out exactly where a person is looking on the screen.
( Press Trust Of India )
Who is Jilly Ballistic?
New York City's most well-known unknown street and subway artist.
New street art in New York shows the error messages that should pop up on posters for bad food and movies.
The best street art doesn’t just brighten an otherwise drab urban environment (though that’s always appreciated), it also comments on the environment itself. And new pieces popping up from New York street artist Jilly Ballistic are taking brilliant swipes at one of the more annoying aspects of city living: insipid advertising.
Using the universal trope of computer and phone alert windows, the pieces offer a bit of hard truth along with the hard sell of the advertisement. On a Budweiser ad, an iPhone alert window warns: "ERROR: Cannot refresh thirst. Please try another beverage." An ad for the new movie The Watch warns that it can’t open "due to lack of substance."
While Jilly Ballistic’s pieces might not actually convince anyone to not see, say, Step Up Revolution, due to critically low expectations (though the trailer seems to indicate that movie is, in fact, awesome), they at least provide a slight respite from the constant assault of marketing messages that bombard the captive audiences on the subway. Perhaps, after banning soda, Bloomberg can mandate warnings on all advertising.
SpiderFarm is a factory that reconstructs the environmental conditions of a spider’s natural habitat. Within the ‘farm’ the spiders spin silk for human use. The SpiderFarm is an open-ended project that intends to develop new materials and yet unrealized objects.
In the spider factory nature’s perfect balance is reproduced. At the same time the system is intended to evoke a strong awareness of nature’s vulnerability.
The factory mimics the natural setting in which spiders live in the wild, recreating the essential aspects that allow them to prosper. In this setting - a factory as an imitation of nature to facilitate the production of spiders - the animals are stimulated to produce silk for human use. Eventually the system might create a material, and objects, with an as yet unrealized potential.
Ad agencies usually create advertising for their clients. Interone of Germany went one step further: It created advertising and a new product idea.
To generate buzz for lingerie maker Beate Uhse at a recent convention, Interone devised the Face Bra. It's a sexy, lacy number in the shape of a bra -- but it's a sleep mask.
Beate Uhse was so impressed that it may produce the Face Bra as a complement to its line of sex toys and naughty wear.
"When we saw the idea we knew this would be something nice to do," Beate Uhse spokeswoman Doreen Schink told The Huffington Post on Monday. "If you see the product, this can be a huge success."
Schink said the company is still in the "decision-making process." We say go for it. The last popular stab at a "face bra" was actually a bra to support the face. And it appeared in fiction. The secretary played by Jane Krakowski on "Ally McBeal" invented one to stop women's faces from jiggling when they jogged. It made her look like a cross between a mummy and Hannibal Lecter.
Interone's Face Bra was originally distributed to travelers on planes, trains and buses to this year's Salon De La Lingerie in Paris, and from there it gained momentum. The tagline on the packaging reads, "Sweet Dreams."
Now 40 winks can come with a wink.
( Huffington post )
What is Postable table?
Studio Toer presents Postable the table that fits in your mailbox
Postable is a stainless steel table design. It is a modular system. Each element fits within the outer dimensions of regular mail. A full-size dinner-table can easily be assembled from the content of one envelop. Postable is available in sizes up to about six feet long. Prices range from $230 to $850. Obviously, they’re shippable.
Buy Postable online
The Postable comes in 3 sizes:
PS: €190.- incl. vat. - Postable Side table: 60*40*38 cm
PM: €390.- incl. vat. - Postable Medium Dinner table: 90*80*75 cm
PM: €690.- incl. vat. - Postable Large Dinner table: 180*80*75 cm
Shipping:
NL: from: €4.00
EU: from: €8.50
rest: from €17.10
What is OpenROV?
OpenROV is a
Do It Yourself telerobotics community centered around underwater exploration and education. Company has developed a low-cost telerobotic submarine that can be built with mostly off-the-shelf parts.
The goal of OpenROV is to democratize exploration by allowing anyone to explore and study underwater environments. The
OpenROV community is also laying the foundation for globally-connected citizen scientists to share their data and findings.
Powered by a small Linux computer, C-batteries, crowdsourced technology, and two guys with a thing for marine exploration, OpenROV promises to transform small remote vehicles--once the provenance of well-funded government agencies--into affordable crowdsourced machines that anyone can send on missions into the world’s oceans, lakes, and bays.
Designed by Eric Stackpole, and developed with David Lang, OpenROV is an open-source research and development project for the public to explore the seas (or caverns, lakes, and almost anywhere underwater where the ROV’s tether will reach). Applications range from scouting dive locations to search and rescue, as well as education.
OpenRov is being sold for $775 through its launch. Its blue body is laser cut from acrylic panels housing three thrusters (two horizontal, one vertical), an HD webcam, LED lights, and eight onboard batteries. The tiny package can dive about 300 feet (tested to 65 feet so far) and hits a top speed of about 2.2 mph during its 1.5 hour running time.
Specs: Version 2.3
Dimensions: 30cm x 20cm x 15cm
Weight: 2.5kg
Depth rating: ~100m
Speed: 1m/sec
Power: 8 onboard C batteries
Run time: ~1.5 hours
Design: Version 2.3
Body construction: Laser cut acrylic
Buoyancy: Inherently neutrally buoyant
Propulsion: 3 brushless motors (2 horizontal thrusters, 1 vertical thruster)
Tether: 1 single twisted pair communicating 10 megabit ethernet data for control and video
Control: Onboard embedded linux computer (beagleboard brand) controlled via remote web browser
Vision: Forward facing HD USB webcam and two 87lm LED light arrays on servo-tiltable platform
Design considerations: Completely open source / open hardware, off the shelf parts, small enough to test in a bathtub, kit can be assembled in one weekend, standardized payload bay.
OpenROV, a tiny battery-powered sub, is a bringing ocean exploration into your home.Your personal remote operated submersible is ready.
OpenROV is a
Do It Yourself telerobotics community centered around underwater exploration and education. Company has developed a low-cost telerobotic submarine that can be built with mostly off-the-shelf parts.
The goal of OpenROV is to democratize exploration by allowing anyone to explore and study underwater environments. The
OpenROV community is also laying the foundation for globally-connected citizen scientists to share their data and findings.
Powered by a small Linux computer, C-batteries, crowdsourced technology, and two guys with a thing for marine exploration, OpenROV promises to transform small remote vehicles--once the provenance of well-funded government agencies--into affordable crowdsourced machines that anyone can send on missions into the world’s oceans, lakes, and bays.Designed by Eric Stackpole, and developed with David Lang, OpenROV is an open-source research and development project for the public to explore the seas (or caverns, lakes, and almost anywhere underwater where the ROV’s tether will reach). Applications range from scouting dive locations to search and rescue, as well as education.
OpenRov is being sold for $775 through its launch. Its blue body is laser cut from acrylic panels housing three thrusters (two horizontal, one vertical), an HD webcam, LED lights, and eight onboard batteries. The tiny package can dive about 300 feet (tested to 65 feet so far) and hits a top speed of about 2.2 mph during its 1.5 hour running time.
Specs: Version 2.3
Dimensions: 30cm x 20cm x 15cm
Weight: 2.5kg
Depth rating: ~100m
Speed: 1m/sec
Power: 8 onboard C batteries
Run time: ~1.5 hours
Design: Version 2.3
Body construction: Laser cut acrylic
Buoyancy: Inherently neutrally buoyant
Propulsion: 3 brushless motors (2 horizontal thrusters, 1 vertical thruster)
Tether: 1 single twisted pair communicating 10 megabit ethernet data for control and video
Control: Onboard embedded linux computer (beagleboard brand) controlled via remote web browser
Vision: Forward facing HD USB webcam and two 87lm LED light arrays on servo-tiltable platform
Design considerations: Completely open source / open hardware, off the shelf parts, small enough to test in a bathtub, kit can be assembled in one weekend, standardized payload bay.
 |
| The Emerald Ace (Provided by Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd.) |
The Emerald Ace, a 60,200-ton car carrier that combines solar power panels with a diesel engine, was shown to the media on June 25 at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd.'s Kobe Shipyard and Machinery Works.
A ceremony to mark the official completion of construction is set for June 29.
The ship is expected to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 4 percent on a two-month voyage to Europe, officials said.
The 199-meter-long vessel can carry 6,400 passenger cars. The 768 solar power panels installed on its deck have an output capacity of 160 kilowatts, enough to power 50 average households.
Energy is stored in 324,000 lithium-ion batteries in the ship’s hold and fed through to the engine. Excess energy is used to power the ship’s radar instruments, lighting, air conditioning and other equipment.
The Emerald Ace shuts down its diesel engine and relies totally on batteries when in port. It is the first ship in the world to produce no emissions while not at sea, according to shipowner Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd.
Panasonic Corp. developed the system that integrates the solar panels with the ship's batteries. The Emerald Ace will be loaded at several ports in Japan before heading for Europe.
( Source: The Asahi Shimbun )
Ford's new traffic jam assist technology will help self driving cars to make their way through road.
First we saw Volvo’s self-driving road trains, which let people take their hands off the wheel while on the highway. Now Ford has announced that it’s working on traffic jam assist technology--an automated system that could take over when drivers are trapped in traffic. Considering that drivers are on average stuck in traffic 30% of the time, that’s giving a significant amount of control over to the car.
The system will use cameras and radars to keep track of vehicles in front of you, making sure that you brake and accelerate just enough to be safe. Automated steering control will ensure that you don’t veer into another lane. When the traffic jam ends, the system asks the driver to resume control of the vehicle
No word on a release date for the technology, but considering that Volvo is already testing its system on highways and Google has a fleet of self-driving cars, it probably won’t be long.
The system will use cameras and radars to keep track of vehicles in front of you, making sure that you brake and accelerate just enough to be safe. Automated steering control will ensure that you don’t veer into another lane. When the traffic jam ends, the system asks the driver to resume control of the vehicle
No word on a release date for the technology, but considering that Volvo is already testing its system on highways and Google has a fleet of self-driving cars, it probably won’t be long.
This week at a technology show in New York City, Perpetua was showing a new way of powering gadgets, Fox News reported on Saturday.
It's not, strictly speaking, a new way. The technology is based on a principle discovered nearly 200 years ago by physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck. Seebeck found that a combination of materials, when warmer on one side and colder on another, produces electricity.
Current heat wave notwithstanding, the human body's temperature of around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is usually hotter than the air around it.
So Perpetua has developed an armband, soon to become a wristband, that produces enough power for small electronics - not smartphones, but items such as Bluetooth devices.
Headsets using a technology called Bluetooth Low Energy need only about 2 volts, said Jerry Wiant, vice president of marketing at Perpetua.
What else uses that level of power? A traditional watch does, he said, as do medical and fitness devices such as heart monitors.
Perpetua's first products are for the US government. The Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology division, for example, is funding a power-conducting jacket to monitor the health and safety of first responders - with sensors for heart rate, breathing rate and levels of pollutants such as carbon monoxide.
But Perpetua is also aiming for consumer products - for example, a watch with a wrist strap that also doubles as a wirelss power source, the broadcaster said.
About Makani Airborne Wind Turbine ( AWT )
The Makani AWT is a tethered, autonomous wing fitted with onboard turbines for power generation. Flying at 1,000 ft, the system mimics the motion, and speed, of a conventional turbine’s aerodynamically effective blade tips.
How does it work?
The Makani Airborne Wind Turbine (AWT) is a tethered wing outfitted with turbines. It flies between 250 and 600 meters (800 and 1,950 feet), where the wind is stronger and more consistent. Makani is developing a 600 kW AWT, for utility scale generation at a cost below conventional solar and wind.
The Makani AWT operates like a wind turbine. Air moving across the turbine blades forces them to rotate, driving a generator to produce electricity.
Due to its speed, the tip of a conventional wind turbine blade is the most effective part and is responsible for most of the energy produced. The Makani AWT takes advantage of this principle by mounting small turbine/generator pairs on a wing that itself acts like the tip of a traditional turbine blade. The wing flies across the wind in vertical circles, fixed to the ground by a flexible tether.
Technicals
Makani has developed hybrid rotors with symmetrical, uncambered foils that let them generate energy as a turbine or apply thrust like a propeller. The rotors are used as propellers to keep the wing aloft during short lapses in the wind, allowing the wing to stay aloft if the wind dies.
Why Airborne Wind Power?
Makani’s Airborne Wind Turbine (AWT) can create inexpensive energy, in more locations than traditional wind turbines, because it flies where the wind is stronger and more consistent.
The Makani AWT can transform wind power:
Requires no more space than conventional turbines
Capable of handling large, sudden shifts in wind speed and direction
Redundant, fault tolerant design
Lightning hardened
Produces power at up to half the cost of traditional wind turbines
Accesses the stronger and more consistent winds at altitude
90% less material than a conventional turbine, it is less expensive to build and install
Opens up large new areas of wind resource, including the vast resources offshore above deep water
Allows for deployment outside of visually or environmentally sensitive locations
The Makani AWT is a practical solution:
Accesses the stronger and more consistent winds at altitude
90% less material than a conventional turbine, it is less expensive to build and install
Opens up large new areas of wind resource, including the vast resources offshore above deep water
Allows for deployment outside of visually or environmentally sensitive locations
The Makani AWT is a practical solution:
Requires no more space than conventional turbines
Capable of handling large, sudden shifts in wind speed and direction
Redundant, fault tolerant design
Lightning hardened
ArduSat is a miniature cubic satellite, measuring 10 cm along each edge and weighing about 1 kg. Onboard it will have a suite of 25+ sensors, including three cameras, a Geiger counter, spectrometer, magnetometer and more. The sensors are connected to a bank of user-programmable Arduino processors, which run your application or experiment, gathering data from the space environment.
The Arduinos can also read status data from the satellite (like orbit position, per-system power usage, board temperature, etc.), so you can also run tests on the satellite itself. Check out our YouTube Channel for technical details and up-to-date videos of the payload development.To run your application, experiment or steer the camera you can write your own code from scratch, leverage existing codes available on the internet or use one of the templates we will make available to our backers, creating a growing library of code elements.
Through our web-interface you can then upload your code to our exact replica of the satellite on the ground and make sure that it works as intended. Once you’ve worked out any bugs in your experiment (not that you would ever have any...) we will run a final test before it is uploaded into space to ArduSat. Now your code is running in space, steering the satellite and gathering data! Once the time you have booked on ArduSat is expired, we will send back the data to you via the internet.
Created by a physicist, two aerospace engineers, and a NASA business manager, the project will allow users on Earth to upload their code via a web interface to a ground-based satellite replica. Once the ArduSat crew is sure that the code works, they’ll send it up to the real satellite. At the end of the experiment, data will be sent back down for users to peruse.The ArduSat team has already built a prototype of the sensors, software, and other technical bits necessary to launch the satellite; now they just need funding (which they have surpassed) to build and integrate all the hardware and software for the launch. Anyone who pledges $325 is guaranteed "three days of uptime on the satellite" to run experiments--not a bad deal.
What ArduSat Apps the nano satellite can do?
flies away over the horizon at over 18 times the speed of sound,
detects meteors vaporizing in the skies over Europe,
photographs the sunset over the horn of Africa,
maps the Earth's magnetic field cruising over the Indian Ocean,
snaps a picture of the Southern Lights dancing underneath off the coast of Australia,
samples the upper atmosphere to learn about biomarkers and other signs of life,
stares down the eye of a hurricane,
maps the emitted spectrum of the sun,
and is already back over your head, having circled the entire planet!
What you can do with ArduSat?
Engineering: Your Eye in the Sky - Try writing an app that would synchronize the output of a head mounted-gyro to the steering system on the satellite. If you’re feeling really ambitious, try downlinking the attitude vector in real-time to watch the satellite follow your head - you could even tie-in your head-steering to our program that takes pictures! (Talk to Joel if you’re interested in this experiment!)
Point-and-shoot - The following settings can be set on the camera: "exposure, gamma, gain, white balance, color matrix, windowing". Try designing an algorithm that fine-tunes the settings to take even better pictures or more artistic pictures!
Entertainment: Geiger Counter Bingo - Write an app that transmits a message with a random number and letter every time a particle hits the satellite with enough energy. Have a 'bingo from space' game between HAM radio amateurs.
Photography Competition - See who among your friends can snap the coolest/most interesting picture from space. The eye of a hurricane, sunrise over the Indian ocean, even aurora from space – see what marvels you can capture!
Take Pictures from Space
The satellite is not just for scientific purposes; ambitious photographers and artists will be able to steer the satellite cameras take pictures on-demand of the Earth, the Moon, or the stars. Especially from the Artist community we expect to see some spectacular private space pictures so we all can marvel at the beauty of Earth from above.
Ringbow is the world’s first wearable accessory for touch devices that provides the functionalities of a mouse, keyboard and joystick simultaneously with your touch. Ringbow transforms touch screen gaming, allows remote control of your operating system, applications, music apps and presentation tools, allows you to operate and answer your phone remotely and turns your device into a multi-user or multi-player platform.
Since touch screens are controlled with fingers, a finger-worn tool, specifically a ring, is the natural choice for complementing them. Operating Ringbow with your thumb, in conjunction with using a touch device, enables countless new features and a much more efficient user experience. Ringbow multiplies the functionality of your finger together with allowing amazing simultaneous actions providing powerful capabilities and layers of functionality that are simply not available in today’s technologies.
Operating the ring with your thumb while using your finger to touch a device provides powerful capabilities and layers of functionality that are simply not available in today’s technologies. Ringbow multiplies the functionality of your finger together with allowing amazing simultaneous actions.
Ringbow lets you free your fingers from your device, leaving your hands available to do whatever you feel like doing: eating a sandwich, drinking a beer, high-fiving your buddy or stroking a puppy. Whatever you'd choose to do with your hands!
Ringbow innovates touch devices’ gameplay, offering unique additions to existing mobile games as well as developing new games that couldn’t previously be played on touch devices. Ringbow also makes porting consoles games and PC games to mobile devices easier than ever which can be done without affecting and damaging their great experience.
Ringbow in a nutshell;
* the world's first touch-screen gaming accessory
* a comfortable ring that you wear on your finger whilst gaming
* adds layers of functionality to each touch
* acts as a mouse/joystick device to use for gaming
* builds a new platform for existing and new games
It simply works
Using Ringbow is extremely easy and staggeringly simple. It is designed to provide natural gaming control, similar to the way we operate our console’s controllers. This allows for an intuitive gaming experience and a sense of tactile feedback which greatly enhances the user experience.
Ringbow works on Android, iOS (coming very soon) and supports any Bluetooth enabled device. It works natively with the operating system and with a large variety of existing applications, although our mission is to provide users with brand new cool features. To do that we've partnered with some leading game developers so that Kickstarter supporters will receive a package of exclusive games with their Ringbow. We also hope that you’ll use our API to enhance your own apps so we can add them to our games and apps directory.
Ringbow offers a D-pad style controller, communicates via Bluetooth and lasts 5 hours per charge. The Ringbow box includes:
- The Ringbow game-ring accessory device
- Micro-USB cable for charging
- Ringbow control panel application for Android & iOS devices
- Game package (see below) including games that were especially designed to support Ringbow, native control of the operating systems and a list of many games that naturally supports Ringbow and works automatically.
This very first Ringbow model is described as a gaming accessory but it can do much, much more. You can use Ringbow for remote browsing while reading; to correct misspelled emails; to act as a remote control for your TV; to answer phone calls while driving; to transform your tablet into a gaming console for your kids;
LUMOback is a wireless posture sensor and mobile app that leverages great design, proven science, and the latest advances in mobile computing.
LUMOback sensorThe sensor provides a gentle vibration when you slouch to remind you to sit or stand straight. It is worn on your lower back and designed to be slim, sleek and so comfortable that you barely feel it when you have it on.
The sensor connects wirelessly to an iPhone 4S or new iPad app which tracks all of your movement data. LUMO, your avatar, mirrors your activities when you sit, stand, walk, run, lay down, and more!
Anyone can use LUMOback. It’s simple and integrates into your daily routine.You live your life. Only better.
The concept:
The Future Office: where our daily tasks help generate the energy needed to power the electronics that we have on our desks. The energy is generated through the pressure of the person walking on the carpet, through the body heat of the person sitting on the chair, through the plants natural acids and sugars, and through the heat from the electronics on the desk. The concept thereby moves sustainable design from the realm of demand and effort and makes it into something tailored to our everyday existence.
What is Unplugged?
Eddi Törnberg has built a prototype desk called Unplugged that uses a combination of green energy tricks to power itself. The carpet is woven with piezo elements that generate power whenever subjected to mechanical stress (walking on it or rolling your chair). A flowering plant is a microbial fuel cell, extracting energy from the sun. And the chair is designed to exploit the Seebeck effect. As one’s body warms the metal on the top of the chair, the bottom of the chair is kept cool through heatsink fins. This difference in temperature emits energy.
While Unplugged doesn’t appear to generate enough electricity (yet) to run a laptop--it appears to only power a small lamp, and not necessarily in a sustained manner--the real point is that these energy sources are invisible, self-contained and, most importantly, entirely passive. Other than its unfinished wood surface, Unplugged resembles any other desk. Check it out..
While Unplugged doesn’t appear to generate enough electricity (yet) to run a laptop--it appears to only power a small lamp, and not necessarily in a sustained manner--the real point is that these energy sources are invisible, self-contained and, most importantly, entirely passive. Other than its unfinished wood surface, Unplugged resembles any other desk. Check it out..
