Yet another example of how to enter the bigtime with your electrical ideas. Learn form example:

MIT Media Lab researchers Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum have designed an Arduino input device that lets you use any electricity-conducting material as a touchpad. Called ‘Makey Makey’, the device works by completing an electrical circuit with any conductive material such as vegitables, pencil lead or one's self to interact with the internet or programs on your computer. For example; you could play games Super Mario Bros by connecting the alligator clips to Play Doh buttons or play a piano program using bananas as the keys.

The research team designed Makey Makey around an Atmel ATMega32u4 8-bit AVR RISC-based microcontroller that runs Arduino Leonardo boot-loader and uses a USB 2.0 port to interface with a computer running an up to date OS (Windows XP, Vista, 7 and Mac OSX). The touchpad device requires no software to run as the PC recognizes it as a regular input device such as a keyboard or mouse and ,therefore, can run anything that uses those peripheral input devices. The team used Kickstarter to fund the Makey Makey project and was successful in reaching over $190,000 US with a target goal of $25,000. The device sells for $35 US (through Kickstarter) and comes with the board, USB cable, a set of alligator clips and your imagination.

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There’s good news for those of you who need to destroy your data stored on your SSD’s quickly and efficiently in an emergency situation. RunCore (manufacturer of SSD’s) has unveiled their new line of InVincible Solid State Disc drives which feature two ways to ensure data destruction.

The first capability the drives feature is ‘Intelligent’ destruction which over-writes the data and returns the drive back to its factory default setting. According to the company there is no possible way to recover the original data stored on the drive once the drive is reset. This is the rather mundane approach as the second option for data elimination is much more fun and effective (as well as costly).

The second option of data deletion the drives feature is self-destruction. Essentially the drive over-volts itself and physically damages the NAND chips inside rendering the drive useless (like a bad CPU overclocking job). To initiate both data erasure and destruction, the InVincible drives feature a two push-button system that is physically attached to the drive with the green button for erasing and a red button for meltdown.

These new drives were designed for the military, as well as other companies and institutions where sensitive data is being used or stored, and come in varying sizes and capacities that can withstand a temperature range of -45 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The company hasn’t said when the InVincible line of will be available or how much they will go for, but chances are they will cost more than current SSD’s and be available before the year is out.

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Digital language translators are used every day. However, there is one dialect that still eludes the automation.

Engineering students, Ranjay Krishna, Seonwoo Lee and Si Ping Wang, from Cornell University are attempting to develop a very different type of translator, one that helps those who cannot make use of auditory signals. The students have created a sign language translator that converts hand gestures to their corresponding letter symbol and sound.

This translator is in the form of a glove for the hand and circuitry that fasten to the forearm. The glove itself contains nine flex sensors, four contact sensors, one x-y axis accelerometers and one z-axis accelerometer. The flex sensors are positioned around the upper/lower knuckles and the contact sensors at the tips of the fingers to distinguish between gestures. The accelerometers are needed because some letters vary only on movements of the hands and other letters vary only on the orientation of the hand.

An ATMega644 Microcontroller is used to analyze the signal from the electromechanical sensors and send transmission requests to the transmitter. The device is made wireless using a Radiotronix transceiver. All of this makes up what they call the Detection Unit, and it is simply strapped to the forearm.  The signal is then received by the base station with outputs the results to an LCD screen as well as transmits the signal to a computer via USB where it can also be outputted as sound through the computer speakers. The students used Matlab, Java and C for all their coding.

As far as can be seen, this device only converts gestures to letters so more development is needed for those gestures that represent nouns or actions but no doubt this is a start towards a world where we can all communicate a little easier.

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A tear-jerking introduction of the technology

A cerebrally controlled robotic system is being developed by a team of researchers from Brown University, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and a host of others could give paralyzed people the ability to use robotic limbs to manipulate objects for themselves. Called ‘BrainGate’, the brain-controlled system allows the user to control a robotic limb through thought. To do this, the team implants a wireless microelectrode array (Neural Interface System) at 4 X 4mm directly on the motor cortex portion of the brain that controls motor function. The series of electrodes (100 in all) on the chip pick up the brain's activity associated with arm movement and sends the signals to a series of computers that use software (unknown at this time) to decode the brains activity. The computers then translate those signals into a series of instructions that tell a robotic arm to move and grasp an object based on the user’s desired intentions. The researchers are presently using two types of robotic arms, which are being continuously developed by DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics and DEKA Research and Development Corporation.

DLR robotic hand/arm concept

The bigger of the two robotic arms being used by the researchers is DLR’s Hand Arm System, which is an external robotic arm made for more robust applications where impacts with heavy objects are nonconsequential (factory and warehouse work?).  The arm consists of a series of mechatronic compliance actuators with 52 drives and over 100 position sensors. The units hand alone features 38 individual tendons with each connected to an individual motor to provide tension and stiffness. The fingers use a similar configuration that uses two separate motors for individual grasping and tension based on the object being manipulated. The arm is so robust that you can actually beat it with a baseball bat without damaging any of the electronics.

Deka arm system

The second arm that the team is working with is DEKA Research and Development’s ‘Luke’ Arm (named after Luke Skywalker's mechanical hand). The arm is actually a robotic prosthesis that was designed for amputee patients and was developed as a DARPA tetraplegia project. The titanium Arm was designed to be roughly the same size as a typical human appendage and houses all of its electronics, motors and actuators inside (exactly how and what technology was used is currently unknown). The prosthesis features 18 degrees of movement which was accomplished by using rigid-to-flex circuit boards that were folded into ‘origami’ shapes placed inside the titanium housing. A vibrational motor at the top of the arm lets the user know how much pressure is needed to grasp an object through varying degrees vibration depending if the wearer is holding an egg or a brick.

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(All images and video courtesy of Crown Institute for Brain Science)

(Left) Erin Treacy Solovey wearing the Brainput device (Right) Artistic concept (via MIT & Erin Solovey)

When it comes to multitasking we as humans try the best we can. While we all have a modicum of ability, some are better than others. It suffices to say, we could all use a boost to become more efficient in our multitude of multitasking efforts, which is why a team of researchers has developed an unconventional solution to the problem. Led by Erin Solovey from MIT’s Humans and Automation Lab, the team has designed a system called ‘Brainput’ that can off-load some of our brains multitasking skills to a computer which is way more efficient at doing multiple things than we could ever hope to be. They system uses a portable low-cost version of a functional magnetic resonance imager called ‘fNIRS’ (functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy) to measure the activity going on in the brain. The measurements are monitored and processed (using two probes) in real-time using Boxy software (from ISS). The information is then analyzed by a software engine (created using both Matlab and Weka tools) to look for specific patterns associated when the individual is multitasking. When the system has learned these patterns the software kicks in and is able to help the user with the task at hand.

A maze was created to test Brainputs effectiveness where a subject had to navigate through using two robots simultaneously. The operator using the fNIRS system was constantly switching back and forth between them and once the software learned the patterns it was able to engage sensors in the robots to help the user with their guidance. While the robots were autonomous, the test subject’s performance did indeed improve. While Brainput is still in its early development stages, it could be implemented into many applications in the future like helping you drive while you’re momentarily distracted or used during surgery with robotic assistance. What if the system could be used wirelessly? If you have an automated laundry machine, you could be slaving at work and washing your laundry at home at the same time! The possibilities are endless.

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Engineers become millionaires in less than 30 days; learn from their example.

Pebble Technology has recently entered into the Kickstarter hall of fame with their E-Paper watch gaining over $10,000,000 US in funding after only 26 hours of being put on the site. So, what makes the E-Paper watch so popular? It functions as a connection interface between your smartphone and as a wrist-mounted watch with app capabilities, a relatively simple embedded system.

Pebble Smartwatch (via Pebble)

The watch can be infinitely customized with different watch-faces (which is always on) and is compatible with both iPhone and Android (2.3 and higher) smartphones with a wide range of apps that let you check e-mail/text messages, caller ID and Facebook/Twitter accounts among others. The E-Paper watch connects to your smartphone through a Bluetooth 2.1+ EDR/4.0 connection and houses an ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller which has over 8X more Flash memory and 12X more RAM than their previous inPulse Smartwatch. The ‘face’ is actually a high-resolution (144 X 168) black and white e-paper display and has a vibrating motor with a 3-axis accelerometer that’s capable of gestural detection. Charging the watch is the same as you would a smartphone by using a USB cable either for your PC/wall-outlet or mobile charging platform and has a life-span of 7 days before it needs to be re-charged. For those of you who love the water, E-paper is expected to be fully water-proofed to either 3 or 5 ATM (up to 165ft) if you can stand the pressure but make no mistake the watch IS NOT water-proof. Pebble Technology has sold out their first batch of 85,000 units, so the rest of us will just have to wait for E-Paper’s second coming.

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Concept models (via FXI)

Only a short time after intensely successful Raspberry Pi hit the market, copy-cats came sweeping in to grab some of the frenzy.

FXI, a Norwegian hardware and software developer, has recently announced that the company plans to release their USB-stick sized computer later this month (May, 2012). The stick, dubbed Cotton Candy, is designed to connect to any screen and turn it into a personal computer. Does this sound familiar?

FXI states that the device can be used to complement mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and notebooks but can also provide ‘smart’ capabilities to standalone screens such as TV’s. While Cotton Candy may be small in size, it none the less houses some pretty big hardware. Providing the computational power is an ARM Cortex A9 1.2GHz processor that’s coupled with a quad-core ARM Mali -400P GPU to deliver HD content (native support for MPEG-4, H.263/4) with resolutions up to 1080p on HD-capable screens. The device packs 1 GB of dedicated memory and the ability to upgrade to 64 GB through micro-SD cards for increased storage of media. Another impressive feature of Cotton Candy is its plethora of connection options that include USB (male) 2.0, micro-USB (female) 2.0 and HDMI. The software it uses is pretty much rounded out with Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and Ubuntu with a virtualization client for Windows, Linux and Mac (sorry no iOS). Content on-screen can be controlled in various ways with integrated keyboards found on tablets and notebooks, or wirelessly with the devices built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections that let you use your smartphone as the interface.

As it stands right now, only Scandinavians will be able to lay their hands on Cotton Candy at the end of May (2012), while the rest of us have to wait till the end of 2012 and should retail for about $200.00 US. The price is nearly 6 times that of the Raspberry Pi. Are the differences worth the extra $165?

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The Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium (HMCC) has recently announced that Microsoft has joined the conglomerate in an effort to integrate HMC technology into next generation systems. The HMCC are a group of electronic equipment manufacturers that include industry giants such as Samsung, IBM and Micron that are looking to develop and implement  advancement in DRAM memory technology called Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC).

The HMC features 15x the performance of DDR3 memory by utilizing a memory die that’s stacked using Through-silicon-VIA (Vertical Interconnect Access used to create 3D circuits- hence the ‘cube’). HMC technology has increased density that enables more memory to be packed into a space that’s 90% less over today’s DDR3 modules while utilizing 70% less energy per-bit.

The connections between the efficient stacked chips are shorter, which is why it takes up less of a foot-print over traditional DDR modules and is also significantly faster. This means that memory bandwidth and clock speeds can remain constant with each new iteration of CPU’s and GPU’s which isn’t limited to networks and PC’s but will also provide a performance boost for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets as well. Microsoft has recently join the Consortium, hoping its resources will get the technology developed quicker. If the Consortium is successful in their developments, the future will indeed be ‘cubed’!

Actual image of a HMC (via HMCC)

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