If you’re being offered to do some researches, by studying the nature of avalanches, would you mind to risk your life on it? Well, you might say, “Why should I do it?”

Do you know, Ed Adams, a 58 years old civil engineering professor has traded in his dynamite for a more challenging approach! He has used a $2 million new snow lab, where it’s aimed at gaining a better understanding of how avalanches occur.

The National Science Foundation and the Murdock Charitable Trust funded the snow lab, where it has been named as “Subzero Research Facility”.

According to Adams, this lab will help the experts getting to know the avalanches and more importantly, the best and more accurate ways to predict them.

Avalanches are difficult to understand and hard to predict comparing to earthquakes, as they can be suddenly happened without even an early warning on it. According to the New York Times, there are totally 31 winter ski resorts should be pay attention with, 16 in the United States and 15 in Canada.

The new snow lab will allow Adams and his colleagues to set the artificial sun at varying conditions to form different structures of snow crystals. Beside that, they have carried out endless avalanches simulation tests inside the snow lab as well! [source]

Have you ever wondered what it’s going to be, if you combined the Zigbee Radio with a Slug? If you have no idea what is the outcome, then you should develop this SlugBee and feel it for yourself!

For your information, Zigbee, where it’s also known as IEEE 802.15.4 is another type of short-range radio standard that uses the 2.4 GHz microwave oven band, wireless Ethernet and Bluetooth service.

If you’re comparing Zigbee with others, it’s the most suitable component for low-power application that involving simple microcontrollers, such as the wireless sensing, home and industrial automation. Normally, the basic parameters of Zigbee are a data rate of up to 250 kbits/s and a typical range of 50m.

A small Linux box like the NSLU2 aka Slug could be useful in a Zigbee deployment. For your information, an always-on Slug can be responsible for logging data sent by remote sensors and generating graphs on web pages or sending email alerts.

The DLP design playing an important in this project, where it have a couple of modules. They both have an RF chip and a microcontroller. Beside that, it also has the advantages of the built-in USB at the host end and processor less operation at the remote end as well!

After you’ve connected the Zigbee radio with a slug, then it’s time to test out the SlugBee…

If you a big fan of Harry Potter series, then you must be very familiar with his invisibility cloak, where he uses it to hide himself from being spotted by anyone else (Although Alastor Moody can easily penetrate it by using the magical charmed eye!)

You might think that It is impossible to develop the invisibility cloak, as this stuff only exist in the magical world! Guess what, the scientists from Duke University explained how to hide objects from a dramatically extended range of wave lengths, and they informed that the invisibility cloaks for visible light could be done within the next six months!

David Smith, the professor of Duke University said that the invisibility cloak will be accomplished within six months of time. This invisibility cloak has its own name, The Duke Cloak!

According to the scientists from Duke University, if you want to manipulate light, the microscopic surface of a material must be smaller than the wave lengths of light that being used. If not, the invisibility cloak won’t work as it did.

However, there’s still a limitation for this invisibility cloak, where it only works in two dimensions. The scientists have mentioned that they will gain up the researches to transform it into an invisibility cloak that can be used in three dimensions! [discovery]

Agriculture and farming are two important fields in human beings life, either in the past or in present days. In order to cultivate and increase the productivity, many researchers have been trying their best to invent some robot that can become a helper in the farming industry.

The Japanese researchers have successfully invented a robot suit, where it’s main purpose is to help reduce the heavy burden of harvesting.

If you refer to the above figure, you can see that a student is wearing a prototype assistance machine that equipped with 8 motors and 16 sensors. This robot suit is weighs about 55 pounds and it can assist the elderly farmers who need support for their leg muscles and joints, especially when they keep a crouching position or lift their arms high.

According to the researchers, they’re looking to use this type of robotic suit in two to three years at an initial price ranging from 500,000 to 1,000,000 yen (It’s equivalent to about $5,00 to $10,000 U.S. dollars).

Although the cost is a little bit pricey, but this robot suit can be a perfect helper in the farming industry for sure. [source]

What’s your hobby? Some people enjoy the outdoor extreme sports, while some might prefer the indoor games. If you have interested on turning the raw sheep’s wool into yarn, by using the spinning wheel, then this electric spinning wheel is the perfect tool for you!

Talking about the spinning wheel, all the traditional spinning wheels have these two main parts: a bobbin and a flyer. The bobbin is holding the spun yarn, while the flyer is twisting the yarn onto the bobbin.

electric spinning wheel.jpg

For your information, the big drive wheel on non-electric spinning wheels is to gaining the spinning rate of the flyer. The quicker the big wheel turnaround, then the faster it will spin.

The electric spinning wheel is having a smaller size than the traditional spinning wheels, as it equipped with a small electric motor and it spins fast enough than the big drive wheel!

Some of the best parts about this electric spinning wheel are:

1. It is much smaller than the traditional spinning wheels,

2. It is portable (You can take it and do the work anywhere you want!),

3. The building cost is between $50 to $150, where it’s extremely cheaper than those that being sold at retail stores!

It’s time to start the spinning work…

You have to prepare many multi-platform eagle designs for manufacture, but you have no ideas what to do about it?

Well, there are many ways to turn an eagle design into an actual PCB. One of the best ways is to save the eagle designs as industry-standard gerber files, where you can use the gerbers files to order a single prototype or in a full panel.

For your information, the toner transfer is the favorite choice of beginners to make a PCB, as the total investment in materials is minimal comparing with other methods. Most of the PCBs are made with the photo-resist process, since the photo process makes nice boards, but it requires a bit of equipments.

While some of the board manufactures, such as the olimex, can be used to make PCBs directly from eagle .brd files. Olimex requires a minimum order of one eurocard-sized PCB (100mmx160mm).

Here’s the simple process of Eagle Designs:

1. Firstly, you’ll need to prepare the design;
2. Secondly, create grebes and generic files that accepted by any PCB fab house;
3. Thirdly, remember to verify the gerbers;
4. Lastly, send the design for production!

The best and cheapest option you can get is to submit gerber files like the professionals, and the best part about it is any of the PCB manufacturers will accept gerber formatted design files without any further modification!

For those of you that live in snowy climates, it will be a disaster every time when the winter is approaching, as you’ll need to shovel tons of snow off your driveway. Furthermore, spending hours shoveling under the cold and chilling weather is definitely the hardest and tortured moment…

Well, with this smart snow shovel, your nightmare can be ended now! For your information, snow shovels, or also known as “i-shovel” is the world’s first autonomous robotic snow shovel. This i-shovel can detect the snow accumulation and cleans the driveway automatically. It has a built in computer to control the shoveling process and various sensors to figure out the perimeter. Read the rest of this entry »

Your life was a little bit dull, and you’re looking for some excitement here? How about develop a funky Net Gun that can be used to catch anything you want?

You must be wondered, “Why should I build this Net Gun, and what’s the purpose of building it?” Well, good question! If you judged it from the appearance, this Net Gun is not a very realistic gadget, but it actually a very powerful tool.

Life is full with many unpredictable events, and you didn’t know what will happen to you in the next second! With this Net Gun, you can use it as the fast catcher, if you found that there’s a thief sneaking into your house in the middle of night…

For your information, this Net Gun is capable of firing a 90 square foot net, from the distance of 15 to 25 feet by using 80-100 psi of compressed air. The net is strong and reusable, thus you don’t need to worry that your prey (thief!?) will destroy the net and run off from it! The launcher section is modular, where it can be easily removed if you want to modify it in the future. [source]

You’re one of the home hobbyist and you love to spend most of the time doing the electronic projects in the weekend? Then, you must know how frustrated it will be, if the project that you’ve done cannot function properly according to your need?

Well, cheer up! All you need here is an assistant that can help you off. Then, this Atanua can be your little helper here. Here is a little extra fact for the word of “Atanua”. According to the Polynesian, Atanua is the goddess of the dawn and wife of Atea. Atuanua is the one that created the seas, after her having a miscarriage and filling the oceans with her amniotic fluid! (Well, it’s only one of the Polynesian myths.)

For your information, Atanua is a real-time logic simulator, where it was designed to help you to learn the basic Boolean logic and electronics. It uses OpenGL hardware-accelerated rendering and a custom UI. By this way, it can help us to detect the fast workflow and a very low learning curve, thus let you to concentrate on learning the subject easily.

Basically, the Atanua UI consists of three main parts, which as:

The component list

The work area

Buttons for useful functions, such as saving and loading

By the way, this Atanua can be used for nontrivial circuits as well!

This 21^st century is known as the “Century of Robotics,” the development of robotics is in leaps and boundaries. If you turn on the television, you’ll probably see or hear news related with new robotics, such as the ASIMO, iRobot and much more.

By the way, have you heard of the Swarm Robotics before? This Swarm Robotics is a new approach to the coordination of multirobot systems, where it consists of large numbers of mostly simply physical robots. Swarm Robotics is one of the hottest research areas in robotics field. The focus for the Swarm Robotics is mainly on complex, emergent behavior arising from the local interactions of individuals.

There are more and more research groups begin their development journey in physical robot swarms. Unlike those distributed robotic systems, Swarm Robotics emphasizes a large number of robots and it promotes scalability. The local communication can be achieved by wireless transmission systems, like radio frequency or infrared.

The miniaturization and cost are the main key-factors in Swarm Robotics. If these two matters can be solved up, then the potential applications for Swarm Robotics will be unlimited! Some of the experts predicted that the Swarm Robotics is going to be the next new trend of household robotics in the future.