Machine Project Benefit: See you there!
They made PATCHES!!!!! So cute...
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Electronic Popables by Jie Qi
via youtube.com
Absolutely gorgeous electronic pop-up book design. This came out of the MIT High-Low Tech Group which is run by Leah Buechley. I was fortunate to see her presentation at a CO-LAB event last year when she was still out here in Colorado. She's doing some of the most interesting work anywhere on the intersections of gender, technology, geekdom, and play.
Teakside Object Lamp
MG Swifte has been in contact on Pool to let us know about a 'tinkered' teakside lamp!
This found object lamp is made from an old teak fruit bowl, a wood veneer fan, a melamine wine cooler, brass window latches, and some tapestry backing fabric. It was made possible by the new compact florescent light bulbs which have a much lower maximum temperature making the range of materials that can be used as diffusers much larger.
It takes a lot of tinkering to make unrelated objects go together to form a unified whole. Often a lamp will go unfinished until I chance upon a method or object that allows it to be finished.
You can read the rest of the contribution on Pool. Thanks MG!
Tinkering with FPGA Digital Logic Design
John has been in contact on Pool to let us know that he tinkers with silicon chips and digital logic circuits.
FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Array. It is a silicon chip with programmable interconnects and configuration that allows you to design your own digital logic circuits.
It used to be that to design digital logic circuits you had to use existing chips such as TTL (Transistor Transistor Logic) or microprocessor chips and peripheral interfaces containing predefined functionality. You typically had to design a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) to wire the chips together. A PCB is usually a piece of fibre glass board with a thin layer or multiple layers of copper cladding on it. You would use photosensitive resist to protect the copper tracks you want to keep and use an etchant to dissolve the unwanted copper. You would then drill holes in the PCB for the component leads and solder the components into place. This was usually a very messy and time consuming process, and once the PCB was produced you could not easily modify it.
FPGAs on the other hand can be reprogrammed to do whatever you want. You can download the design into the chip from your PC using a USB or printer port cable or use Flash memory to store the design. You still need a PCB to mount the FPGA on, but you can buy general purpose evaluation boards from various vendors.
We have to confess that we'd never come across the term FPGA before!
You can read the rest of John's contribution on Pool here.
Tinkering picture: Robert Hart's workbench
via flickr.com
A real tinkerer should have a really messy workbench.
This picture was submitted to our Flickr group 'Tales of Tinkering' by Robert Hart from South Australia.
The future is coming for you...
via engadget.com
... and it's just a little bit scary.
At Kigali Electronics Center. Note the pile of generators outside the front door
via Pixelpipe
Get used to plasmonics, it is here to stay.
Plasmonics is an emerging technology that attempts to put together the best of two worlds — optics and electronics.
When compared to other technologies, electronics is relatively slow — because of physical limits in the cables, it can't be pushed over a few tens of GHz.
On the other hand, it does allows us to manipulate signals with very small devices for a cheap price.
But optics can reach incredibly high speeds, making it a great choice for fast communications, but is relatively bulky and expensive.
Researchers have long realized that using light for manipulating information rather than just communication could be the key to achieving much faster data processing.
Unfortunately, the size and performance of photonic devices is limited by the width of optical fibers, which must be at least half of the light's wavelength in order to propagate correctly, making miniaturization efforts extremely challenging.
Often referred to as "light on a wire," plasmonics is an alternative approach to faster data processing that uses the density waves of electrons to send both optical and electronic signals on the same metal circuitry.
These waves, or "plasmons", are created when light hits a metal surface under precise circumstances and have frequencies in the optical range, meaning they can encode roughly the same amount of information as fiber optics.
What's even more interesting, plasmons are not subject to the same physical constraints of light, meaning they can travel on tiny metal wires allowing the same kind of miniaturization that the electronics industry has been experiencing for decades.
A serious obstacle to the widespread use of this technology so far has been that plasmons tend to dissipate after only a few millimeters of propagation, making them unusable on most computer chips.
Under the EU-funded Plasmacon project, a team of European researchers has reported they have now overcome this obstacle, demonstrating the first commercially-viable plasmonics devices.
The researchers' approach was to develop a so-called "dielectric-loaded surface plasmon polariton waveguide" (DLSPPW), a layer of dielectric that was patterned onto a gold film with a glass substrate.
Using this structure, they were able to achieve waveguides only 500 nanometers in size and extend the signal propagation, opening the way to further advances.
Unlike previous results obtained by other research groups, the technology developed by the team can create plasmonic devices using existing and low-cost commercial lithography techniques, and while some issues still need to be tackled, it would seem that one of the main obstacles has just been overcome.
Using the special waveguide they developed, the researchers built several plasmonic devices including a waveguide ring resonator — a crucial component of the multiplexers in optical networks that combine and separate several streams of data into a single signal and vice versa — at much smaller sizes than usual.
For instance, while current optical ring resonators have a radius of up to 300 micrometers, the one built by the team measured just five micrometers.
Professor Zayats, optics professor at Queen's University, Belfast, says the ultimate goal is an integrated photonic circuit based on plasmonic excitations capable of performing all operations completely optically.
