Nov
25

Need New Furniture? Now You Can Just Print It Off

Osama Hanif Gadgets, Technology 1 comment

3D Printed Tables using 3D Printing

Soon tables like these will be available to download and print in your home

As Christmas fast approaches, millions will opt to spare themselves the crowded high street and instead settle down in front of the computer and do their shopping there.

Yet buying online has always had one key disadvantage: you have to wait.

Not only that, but the inability to touch a product, try it on, feel how heavy it is or do anything else you would do on your typical high street excursion prevents online shopping being the perfect experience.

But technology is now coming online that could allow you to receive your goods straight away.

As the cost of 3D printing hardware begins to drop, bespoke, printable products may be about to hit the market.

Fashion potential

Freedom of Creation is a design and research company exploring the capabilities of what, in the industry, is known as rapid prototyping.

Janne Kyttanen is the company’s founder and creative director.

“Imagine the potential of this for the fashion industry.”

“I can measure your body, in 3D, and I can make you perfectly fitting garments in the future without any sewing and stitching, making the needle and the thread obsolete.”

His company is now producing products for companies including Asics, Tommy Hillfiger and Hyundai.

A hook made using a RepRap printer This hook was printed on a RepRap machine

Away from the fashion world, 3D printing has many applications for the developing world.

The ability to produce specially designed objects from a computer offers exciting possibilities for making vital tools in poorer, hard to reach areas.

One scheme that is looking to capitalise in the technology is RepRap, short for Replicating Rapid Prototyping, which offers a cheap way of replicating objects – including the printer itself.

“It’s a 3D printer that prints out a kit of parts for another 3D printer,” explained Dr Adrian Bowyer from the University of Bath.

“It doesn’t print every last single part. There are some which, at the moment, are a little bit difficult for the machine to manage – so things like electric motors and the electronics circuitry the machine can’t do for itself – but it prints out a lot of the rest.”

Technological disruption

In contrast to early 3-D printing machines which cost around £20,000, Dr Bowyer says a RepRap machine comes in at just £300.

And the software and hardware specifications are all open source – meaning the machine can be duplicated freely.

This low barrier to entry has piqued the interest of many entrepreneurs, keen to see how the technology can be effectively deployed.

David Flanders, a technology enthusiast and blogger based in London, has been experimenting with ways to do good with the RepRap machine.

“Imagine I print you a shoe. Your child grows, as they do. You take that shoe, you throw it back in the shredder – the shredder then processes the plastic.

“You scale up your design 0.3% and you’ve got your child’s next shoe. That’s the type of imaginative excitement that we really are talking about.”

In the past, the ability to print, burn CDs or DVDs have been seen as a serious threat to intellectual property, making the act of piracy easier.

3D printing is no different. Public Knowledge, a Washington-based public interest group “working to defend citizens’ rights in the emerging digital culture” referred to the advancements as the “next great technological disruption”.

In a paper entitled “It will be awesome if they don’t screw it up”, Michael Weinberg wrote: “The ability to reproduce physical objects in small workshops and at home is potentially just as revolutionary as the ability to summon information from any source onto a computer screen.”

He is now calling on 3D printing entrepreneurs to remain vigilant of policy debates attempts as the technology develops into the mainstream.

[Via BBC]

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Oct
28

Mother Murdered Her Baby For Interrupting Her FarmVille Game

Osama Hanif Facebook, Gaming, Social Media, Technology Add you comment

A 22-year-old mother from Jacksonville, Florida, has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for shaking her 3-month-old son to death after his crying interrupted her FarmVille game.

The mother, Alexandra V. Tobias, was arrested in January and declared her plea on Wednesday before Circuit Judge Adrian G. Soud, The Florida Times-Union reports.

She told investigators that she shook the baby, smoked a cigarette “to compose herself,” and proceeded to shake him again. The baby may have hit his head during one of the two shakings, she said.

FarmVille, named one of the “worst inventions” in recent decades by Time magazine, has more than 60 million members, most of whom access the game through Facebook. Some players have found it so addicting that they’ve lost their jobs and racked up debts north of $1,000.

Needless to say, it is Ms. Tobias — and not the game itself — that is responsible for the death of her 3-month-old son. This is not the first time that a virtual game has led to murder; in 2009, 28-year-old Joseph Johnson of Chicago was charged with first-degree murder after allegedly shooting his companion in the head while playing an Xbox game.

[Via Mashable]

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Sep
21

Mobile Phones Powered by Speech: Recharge More as You Talk More

Osama Hanif Environment, Mobile Phones, Technology Add you comment

Chatty teenagers could be the world’s next renewable energy source. In the search for alternative energy sources there’s one form of energy you don’t hear much about, which is ironic because I’m referring to sound energy.

Sound energy is the energy produced by sound vibrations as they travel through a specific medium. Speakers use electricity to generate sound waves and now scientists from Korea have used zinc oxide, the main ingredient of calamine lotion, to do the reverse – convert sound waves into electricity. They hope ultimately the technology could be used to convert ambient noise to power a mobile phone or generate energy for the national grid from rush hour traffic.

“Just as speakers transform electric signals into sound, the opposite process — of turning sound into a source of electrical power — is possible,” said Dr. Young Jun Park, a scientist at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, and Sang-Woo Kim, the two corresponding authors of a new article in the journal Advanced Materials.

“Sound power can be used for various novel applications including mobile phones that can be charged during conversations and sound-insulating walls near highways that generate electricity from the sound of passing vehicles,” the co-authors added.

Harvesting energy from phone calls and passing cars is based on materials known as piezoelectrics. When bent, a piezoelectric material turns that mechanical energy into electricity.

Lots of materials are piezoelectric: cane sugar, quartz and even dried bone creates an electrical charge when stressed. For decades, scientists have pumped electricity into piezoelectric materials for use in environmental sensors, speakers and other devices.

Over the last few years, however, scientists have made dramatic advances in getting electricity out of piezoelectric devices. Most of these devices, which are not yet available for consumer purchase, would generate power as a person walks, runs or, in this case, talks. The U.S. Army is even looking at partially powering some vehicles by channeling the physical impact of a bullet into a small electrical current.

The Korean scientists, however, want to harness a different kind of power source: sound waves.

Using zinc oxide, the main ingredient in calamine lotion, Young Jun Park, Sang-Woo Kim and their colleagues created a field of nanowires sandwiched between two electrodes. The researchers blasted that sandwich with sound waves, which at 100 decibels were not quite as loud as a rock concert. A normal conversation is about 60-70 decibels.

The sound waves produced a mild electrical current of about 50 millivolts. The average cell phone requires a few volts to operate, several times the power this technology can currently produce.

The new research is interesting, said Michael McAlpine, a scientist at Princeton University who also builds energy harvesting devices.

“But the real question though is whether there is enough ambient noise to act as a power source as for a cell phone,” said McAlpine. A consumer probably wouldn’t want to attend a rock concert or stand next to a passing train to charge their cell phone.

The Korean scientists agree: 50 millivolts is not a lot of power, but they also say their research is proof of concept. As they continue their work, they expect to get a higher power output.

(Via Discovery News)

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May
25

'Zombie-sat' and the Clever Orbital Dance

Osama Hanif Technology Add you comment

by Jonathan Amos

The “dead-but-alive” telecommunications satellite, Galaxy-15, has begun to enter the space of neighbouring craft, and their operators are planning evasive action.

Galaxy 15“Zombie-sat” has captured the imagination of the internet space forums these past few weeks. It’s probably the nickname that’s done it.

When we sit on the sofa skipping across the smorgasbord of channels with our remote-controls, we don’t usually give much thought to the “bent pipes” that sit 36,000km above our heads, delivering the televisual feast.

Intelsat’s Galaxy-15 satellite was put in geostationary orbit five years ago to re-distribute TV services to cable companies across North America, and also to send navigation data to aeroplanes to improve the accuracy of their GPS receivers.

But the “bird” experienced a major hiccup at the beginning of April.

It’s not known precisely what happened. One possibility is that it was damaged by high-speed particles billowing off the Sun in a solar storm – an ever-present danger for orbiting electronics.

Read the rest of this entry


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