Make: Online: News from the Future Archives

Archive: News from the Future

< Previous | News from the Future Home | Next >

September 17, 2009

Working printed handcuff key

A German hacker named Ray has printed a working handcuff key, to the Dutch national pattern, on his RepRap. You can download the .STL file here. Not that we encourage that sort of thing. <SUBLIMINAL>Do it do it do it do it.</SUBLIMINAL> [via Boing Boing]

September 14, 2009

Wirelessly networked door locks

Both Schlage and Kwikset offer exterior-grade door locks that can report and update their statuses wirelessly via e-mail. So you can check, after you get to the office, if you remembered to lock the front door or not, and do so if you forgot. I want a kitchen stove that does the same thing.

Of course, to be fair, I'm not sure I want my house to be no more secure than my e-mail account, so I'll probably be waiting until the technology is well established, personally, to consider such an upgrade.

Unbreakable umbrella protects against assailants, watermelons

Watch a man use the Unbreakable Walking-Stick Umbrella to chop through a watermelon at 1:12...

The Unbreakable Umbrella works just as well as a walking stick or cane but does not make you look funny or feel awkward. Whacks just as strong as a steel pipe but it weighs only 1 lb. and 11 oz. (775 g).

   * Legal to carry everywhere

   * Never raises suspicions

   * Does not make you look silly (no strange looks if carried by an able-bodied person)

Our Unbreakable Umbrella has no unusual parts, no more metal than an average umbrella, it does not arouse suspicion, can be carried legally everywhere where any weapons are prohibited, unlike a walking stick it does not cause strange looks if carried by an able-bodied person, and it does protect from rain. Anyone who can use a stick for defense can use this umbrella.

[via Core77]

September 11, 2009

Airless bike tires available now

More than one commenter on yesterday's post about tweels in development for the military expressed curiosity about the possibility of non-pneumatic bicycle tires. Turns out you can buy them, online, right now, from here, and here, and probably some other places that don't turn up in a Froogle search. I have not tried them myself but I'd be curious to have comments from anyone who has.

September 10, 2009

Prototype airless vehicle tires

As we have reported before, the idea of an airless tire (or "tweel") is at least as old as the 1930s. Still, these photos of prototype non-pneumatic tires under development for the US military by Resilient Technologies, LLC, are pretty sick. Gimme!

September 6, 2009

Library without the books?

539W
We've posted about tool lending libraries before... and here is a library without the books @ The Boston Globe...

This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks - the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’ [the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel in which books are banned]. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’

Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

September 1, 2009

Scientists design first robot using slime mold

Haeckel Mycetozoa
Scientists design first robot using slime mold @ Physorg via Beyond the beyond.

Scientists at the University of the West of England are to design the first ever biological robot using mould. Researchers have received a Leverhulme Trust grant to develop the amorphous non-silicon biological robot, plasmobot, using plasmodium, the vegetative stage of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum, a commonly occurring mould which lives in forests, gardens and most damp places in the UK. The Leverhulme Trust funded research project aims to design the first every fully biological (no silicon components) amorphous massively-parallel robot.
...Professor Adamatzky says that there are long term potential benefits from harnessing this power, “We are at the very early stages of our understanding of how the potential of the plasmodium can be applied, but in years to come we may be able to use the ability of the mould for example to deliver a small quantity of a chemical substance to a target, using light to help to propel it, or the movement could be used to help assemble micro-components of machines. In the very distant future we may be able to harness the power of plasmodia within the human body, for example to enable drugs to be delivered to certain parts of the human body. It might also be possible for thousands of tiny computers made of plasmodia to live on our skin and carry out routine tasks freeing up our brain for other things. Many scientists see this as a potential development of amorphous computing, but it is purely theoretical at the moment.”

Pictured above - The 93rd plate from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1904), depicting organisms classified as Mycetozoa....

August 31, 2009

And I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

David over at Boing-Boing spotted this jaw-dropping video of an experimental robot arm doing things that scare the bejeesus out of me. David writes:

Researchers from the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory at the University of Tokyo presented this incredible video of a high-speed robotic hand at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The laboratory's Web site has many more videos related to this project, called Sensor Fusion. Sensor Fusion: High Speed Robots

For my money, the most impressive stuff is around 2:22, near the end.

August 28, 2009

Researchers hope to mass-produce robots on a chip

Iswarm4
Researchers hope to mass-produce robots on a chip @ Physorg...

Tiny robots the size of a flea could one day be mass-produced, churned out in swarms and programmed for a variety of applications, such as surveillance, micromanufacturing, medicine, cleaning, and more. In an effort to reach this goal, a recent study has demonstrated the initial tests for fabricating microrobots on a large scale.

August 24, 2009

ASIMO avoids moving obstacles

Impressive vision system on this bot'

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have given Honda's humanoid robot, ASIMO, the ability to walk towards a goal position while avoiding stationary and moving obstacles...

August 14, 2009

Designs to deal with the rising tides

The terrific blog Inhabitat has an intriguing article about the winning entries in the Rising Tides competition, wherein entrants came up with ways to deal with what could be a 55" rise in the San Francisco Bay waters in the next century.

From Inhabitat's recap:

Another mind-boggling solution to the high-water mark is Folding Water, by Kuth Ranieri Architects. The proposal is an alternative to the traditional barrier dike: this one placed in the middle of the bay, maintaining current water levels with a series of pump walls and artificial estuaries. It looks invisible: reminiscent of what we hope our future impact to be: undetectable.

The competition ended up with 6 winners sharing a $25,000 prize, and there were a handful of Honorable Mentions highlighted as well. The whole thing -- the competition, the plethora of entries, the thoughtfulness and cleverness of the entries -- was a great reminder to me that makers hold the key to surviving the next 100 years and beyond.

August 12, 2009

Dude, Where's my (flying) car? Part 2

Bill Gurstelle is a Contributing Editor for MAKE magazine. His most recent book is entitled Absinthe & Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously. You can follow Bill on his danger-quest at twitter.com/wmgurst. He is a guest Make: Online author for the month of August.

In my last online article, I discussed the concept of the flying car and how difficult it is to make a viable one. But designers continue the quest.

Hollywood set designer turned engineer Norman Bel Geddes came up with one of the first flying car concepts. His work yielded a design for something that looked much like a 1940 Chevy Coupe with wings welded onto the sides and the wheels replaced by a single rear-facing propeller.

Bel Geddes never got off the ground with it.

But since then, quite a few flying cars have been successfully flown. One of the first and perhaps most successful was the ConvAIRCAR.

On paper, the ConvAIRCAR was envisioned as the marriage between an automobile and an airplane. It promised to revolutionize the daily drive for thousands, perhaps millions, of commuters.

In November of 1947, a prototype ConvAIRCAR circled San Diego for about an hour and a half. It appeared, for a brief time, that the aircraft's developers had actually produced "the Fertile Mule," that is, a hybrid with a viable future. But, in reality, this airborne sedan was still a flying car, and therefore a single successful test flight proved little.

A few days after the test flight, a test pilot crash-landed the ConvAIRCAR on a dirt road when it ran out of gas. The only prototype of the ConvAIRCAR in existence was damaged beyond repair. And that's as far as that particular flying-car ever went.

Next post: Flying car tragedy

More:
Dude, where's my (flying) car? Part 1

Dude, where's my (flying) car? Part 1

A flying car is, to many futurists and makers, the epitome of technological progress; the holy grail of personal technological achievement. A car that flies from Chicago to Fort Wayne and an airplane that one can drive to the Piggly Wiggly to pick up eggs and coffee, all in the same package -- that's what I want.

We're a clever group, so here's an obvious question: Why is there no flying car in your garage? It's well into the 21st century, it seems like we've had plenty of time to tackle this. Over the next few days, I'd like to a look at what progress (or lack thereof) various individuals and companies have been made towards realizing my dream machine. It's a long story, and to be honest, not a particularly pretty one.

So, let's begin considering this question with the words of recent Louisiana gubernatorial candidate Patrick Landry.

"As Governor, I shall seek investors who will bring their capital to Louisiana in an effort to design, develop, and eventually mass-produce an aeromobile. This vehicle, which would revolutionize transportation in America, would be a cross between an ultra light aircraft and an automobile. The intended purpose is to create the ability of lift-off between 55 and 75 MPH, flying at low altitudes for short distances, and conceptually, look similar to an Indy racecar."

-- Unsuccessful 2003 Louisiana Gubernatorial Candidate Patrick "Live Wire" Landry

Patrick E. Landry first threw his hat into the political ring in 1999. Landry, called "Live Wire" because of his background as an electrician, claimed that among his qualifications for high office was his virginity.

Obviously, Landry was something of a fringe candidate. But his virginity, his plan to nuke Baghdad, and his Flying Car Development Platform, got him over 10,000 votes. In fact, in the 2003 governor's race, Landry came in eighth out of seventeen candidates.

The flying car idea didn't start with animated cartoons in the 1960s, although most baby boomers probably first imagine something like what George Jetson dropped off daughter Judy of at Orbit High in. Actually, it's a concept that's been in the air since airplanes were first invented.

This is the flying car, designed by Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria in 1885. Everyone said he was nuts. But now, 120 years after his death, German scientists have shown him to be one of the unsung pioneers of flight. ludwigs flying car.jpg

Ludwig, whose fantastical castle at Neuschwanstein aptly featured in the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, drew up plans for a flying car more than two decades before the Wright brothers took to the air, but when he tried to build it he was declared insane and stripped of his crown.

Recently German aeronautical experts re-studied Ludwig's designs and say they would have worked. Sketches recovered from letters between the ruler and Austrian engineer Gustav Koch show the monarch had planned to create a fleet of flying machines that would take him across his beloved Alpine lakes to his many castles, including the fairytale Neuschwanstein.

In my next article, I'll look at a couple of attempts that came close...

August 7, 2009

Inflatable buttons

Folks at Carnegie Mellon are developing displays with inflatable buttons to make for a tactile touch screen. The video has got to be seen to be believed. Via Core77.

August 6, 2009

Through-color MDF

German chemical giant BASF pioneered the technology to colorize the traditionally blah-colored world of manufactured wood products like medium-density fiberboard (MDF). Besides requiring no or little finishing, through-color MDF will not betray scrapes or scratches like painted material. It has been available in Europe for awhile now, but only relatively recently in the US through Packard Forest Products.

August 2, 2009

Toyota’s running humanoid robot

Toyota’s running humanoid robot -

[The video] from Toyota demonstrates the running capabilities of the new humanoid robot. The robot takes a step every 340ms and has no contact with the ground for 100ms of that. Notice in the video how the robot remains balanced even after pushed by the human

We still miss the QRIO... and the AIBO.

TubeSat - Personal satellite kit?

Tubesat Solar Cells Antenna Earth Background Assembly Heading 1
This appears to be a "satellite kit" for $8k via /.

Planet Earth has entered the age of the Personal Satellite with the introduction of Interorbital's TubeSat Personal Satellite (PS) Kit. The new IOS TubeSat PS Kit is the low-cost alternative to the CubeSat. It has three-quarters of the mass (0.75-kg) and volume of a CubeSat, but still offers plenty of room for most experiments or functions. And, best of all, the price of the TubeSat kit actually includes the price of a launch into Low-Earth-Orbit on an IOS NEPTUNE 30 launch vehicle. Since the TubeSats are placed into self-decaying orbits 310 kilometers (192 miles) above the Earth's surface, they do not contribute to any long-term build-up of orbital debris. After a few weeks of operation, they will safely re-enter the atmosphere and burn-up. TubeSats are designed to be orbit-friendly. Launches are expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2010.

A TubeSat is designed to function as a Basic Satellite Bus or as a simple stand-alone satellite. Each TubeSat kit includes the satellite's structural components, safety hardware, solar panels, batteries, power management hardware and software, transceiver, antennas, microcomputer, and the required programming tools. With these components alone, the builder can construct a satellite that puts out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held HAM radio receiver. Simple applications include broadcasting a repeating message from orbit or programming the satellite to function as a private orbital HAM radio relay station. These are just two examples. The TubeSat also allows the builder to add his or her own experiment or function to the basic TubeSat kit.

July 23, 2009

Augmented reality businesscard

Jonas writes -

My interactive media project this semester is about the augmentation of the classic communication medium business card. I tried to extend it wisely, so that you can have the essential information of a businesscard (adress, email etc.) and at the same time create a very personal and interesting possibility to introduce yourself to others. I kept the physical businesscard and extended it digitally. I don't think the "analog" business card will die soon, to many people it is almost like a status symbol and in Japan for example the "handing over" of a business card is quite a ritual. With my project i keep these possibilities and bring a new interesting touch to this communication medium.

I asked myself which technology is suited best for what I want and what came to my mind pretty quickly was Augmented Reality.

While developing my concept it was very important to me that everybody should be able to create such a businesscard and present himself to the audience. Also i am a Star Wars fan and i liked the idea of displaying the person as a kind of "hologram" :)

July 15, 2009

3D digital cameras... no glasses required

3D Camera 0720-1
Fig 07
Fig 08
3D cameras are coming, this year -

More than two decades ago, Fujifilm was one of the first camera manufacturers to see the future of photography was digital. In 1988, the Japanese imaging giant developed the world's first fully digital still camera; 10 years ago Fujifilm held 30% of the digicam market. But that dominant position proved difficult to defend against competitors such as Nikon, Olympus and Canon. Today, Fujifilm is one of the industry's also-rans, with just a 6.7% market share.
There's one way to get back into the game: invent new rules. That's just what Fujifilm plans to do later this year when it unveils the world's first 3-D digital camera for consumers. The company hopes that its groundbreaking new gadget -- tentatively named the FinePix Real 3D System -- will allow it to leapfrog the competition by bringing 3-D capabilities to the masses, at the same time putting a little buzz back into the business of taking snapshots.

....In the past, special viewing accessories such as 3-D glasses or stereoscopes were needed for this to work. Not so with Fujifilm's system, which offers two viewing options. One is a 3-D digital picture frame -- an eight-inch (20 cm) LCD screen that directs the dual images to the left and right eyes, creating the 3-D effect. The other option is 3-D prints, which are made with a clear plastic overlay that acts as a kind of 3-D lens. Fujifilm plans to launch an online service that will make 3-D prints for consumers.

Some additional tech details on their press site. Camera will be about $600 and the 3D prints are $5 a pop - I'm sure we'll be able to make our own prints, use our own screens and save some $. And of course, you can make your own 3D cameras and images right now...

More:

June 5, 2009

Next-gen POV bike-wheel display tech

I was stunned to see the MonkeyLectric folks' new persistence of vision (POV) bike-wheel video display at Maker Faire, and to see how far they've... er... driven this tech since the last time I saw it. The video does a good job of showing off all that it can now do. Dan Goldwater adds:

I didn't say it in the video, but this is cutting-edge tech! The notorious 'pimpstar' car wheels only do static images, not video. They also appear to have much worse color depth - their video shows only 8 colors while we have 4096 - this was a significant technical hurdle in POV and i have not seen any other POV system anywhere with more than 8 colors (or with full video).

MonkeyLectric.com