WELCOME TO NIJA'S WORLD
Total Pageviews
Monday, June 20, 2016
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Robotics
Google appears to be building a robot army, and I’m not even kidding when I wrote that. Google first dabbled in robotics for their driverless cars. But later on, it acquired at least 8 robotics companies, including Boston Dynamics which is known to build Pentagon-funded advanced robots. Here’s a recently released video of Spot created by Boston Dynamics.
As of this writing Google has been successfully awarded the patent to “control robot armies“. They have also patented building robots with personalities. And they are doing a lot more behind the scenes. Should we be worried? Well…
Google is actually pushing for flawless autonomous machines which could interact with each other, download updates from their server, and many more things. Think of Google’s self-driving cars with the ability to communicate with each other while on the road, predicting routes, avoiding collisions, managing traffic on their own
And then there’s these robots with personalities, which is a bit on the creepy side because it could mimic the dead. Alright, to be fair, these robots will "carry" transferable personalities by people who have passed on. Perhaps this can be helpful in easing the grief of people who have suffered a sudden and heavy loss?
Monday, January 18, 2016
Project Jacquard
Finally, there’s Project Jacquard. According to Droid-Life, the ATAP team wants to add smart features to clothes in the future by adding special conductive strands of yarn to certain parts of jackets or pants, which would turn them into touch interfaces for nearby devices.
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Google's New Project Is So Insanely Advanced It Will Blow You Away
If
Google has its way, our future will be nothing less than a sci-fi movie. After
creeping us out with a robotic cheetah and the Google ‘Glass’,
Google is all set to bring forth something really amazing. Google’s Project
Soli has invented a new interaction sensor using radar technology that can
capture motions of your fingers at up to 10,000 frames per second. And that is
something that has never ever been done before. Simply put, this technology is
so bafflingly accurate that you could operate any device (fitted with this)
without having to even touch it.
Approximately
the size of a small computer chip, this technology can transform your hand into
a virtual dial machine to control something as mundane as volume on a speaker,
or into a virtual touchpad to a smartwatch or a smartphone screen. Check out
the GIF below to get a better idea of how this works.
This
chip is actually a miniature gesture radar that captures even the most complex
hand movements at close range, at unbelievably hyper speeds and replicates hand
gestures. Given the micro size of the chip, it can almost be fitted into
literally anything. This technology, if the project is successful, can make the
need to touch a device to operate it redundant.
Friday, January 8, 2016
New Wearable Keyboards Could Be Sewn into Clothing
The Apple Watch and Google Glass are some of the
most widely known wearable devices, but the ways users can interact with these
"smart" gadgets
are limited. For instance, it would be pretty difficult to type a message out
on the face of a watch. And forget even trying with a pair of smart glasses.
But now, researchers have developed wearable keyboards made of electronics
knitted together like fabric that could lead to a new kind of human-machine
interface.
Right now, the key way that people interact with
computers is by using the keyboard, researchers say. However, creating wearable
keyboards for wearable
electronics is a challenging task — such keyboards have to be large to fit enough
keys to be useful, and must be flexible and stretchable to follow the movements
of the human body.
In the past three years or so, researchers have
tried to make electronics more wearable by making
them like clothing — for instance, by knitting wires together into fabrics.
These electronic textiles can get stretched up to the limit where the fibers
are straightened. Such technology "provides a simple way to interact with
machines," said Esma Ismailova,a polymer science engineer at the National
School of Mines in Gardanne, France, andco-author of a new study describing the
new keyboards. [Best
Smartwatches 2015 – Buying Guide]
The researchers started with polyester fabric. They
stenciled the outline for an electronic circuit onto the fabric using an
electrically insulating silicon rubber called PDMS. Then, they brush-painted an
electrically conductive plastic called PEDOT:PSS onto the outline to fill it
out. Finally, they coated this electronic
circuit with more PDMS.
The scientists used electrodes to connect this
circuit to a computer. Square and rectangular patches of the circuit served as
the keys of a keyboard. Pressing down onthese patches generated easily
detectable electrical signals.
The prototype keyboard can be worn on a sleeve and
has 11 keys, representing the numbers 0 to 9 as well as an asterisk. The
researchers noted that this fabric could be stretched by up to 30 percent and
that after 1,000 cycles of stretching and relaxation, the fabric stayed about
90 percent as electrically conducting as it did at the start.
"A wearable keyboard would provide a more
intuitive interface for tactile input than the touch-sensitive
face of a smartwatch or the hand gestures that control devices such as the
Google Glass," Ismailova told Live Science.
The researchers suggested that textile keyboards
could be woven not only into clothing, but also into furniture, wallpaper and
other surfaces. Such technology "promises to enrich our daily lives with
smart accessories and to change the way we interact with computers,"
Ismailova said.
The researchers belong to a French consortium
working on biomedical applications of textiles, which also includes companies
interested in commercializing aspects of this work.
"One could envision, for example, using such a
keyboard to control their smartphone, activity-tracking device or, down the
road, an implantable medical device," Ismailova said. "It is a rather
straightforward technology, so I would expect some applications in less than
five years. Applications in biomedical — for example, textile electrodes for
monitoring the heart — might take a bit longer due to regulations."
Stop searching, Start finding, with Blutooth smart tags
Proximity tags
have emerged as a popular application of Bluetooth Smart’s low-power features,
allowing users to attach a tag to anything valuable or that tends to lose
frequently, and then use an app to track the tag.
While many
companies have sprung up offering variations of the application, the underlying
Bluetooth Smart implementation can greatly affect the user experience and
determine which of these start-ups will last.
For anyone who’s ever spent time rushing around
trying to find keys, a wallet, or even kids, the spate of tracking devices and
related applications from companies such as Tile, Protag, TrackR, Hippih, Pally
and Audiovox, just to name a few, are a welcome relief.
With a range of up to 30m, these tags can be
attached to anything that is likely to move or get left behind, and will alert
the user that they’re out of range with a beep, buzz, chime or choice of tune
on their smartphone, depending on the design.
The designs also vary by loudness of the tags’ own
buzzers (50 to 80dB, typical), price, accuracy, response time, radar
capability, geo fencing, crowd-sourcing/finding features, size and form factor,
platforms supported and of course, battery life. Battery life ranges from 6 to
12 months, or some may have rechargeable batteries.
The crowd-sourcing/finding feature is particularly
interesting as the greater the number of users in the community, the greater
the odds are that the device will be found if left at a park, restaurant or
beach.
For devices that measure typically 1 x 1 inch, can combine all the wireless
features mentioned above, and still be able to last 6 to 12 months, is a
tribute to Bluetooth Smart, also called Bluetooth Low Energy (LE), the
underlying wireless communications technology that all these devices have in
commonWhy Bluetooth Smart
Bluetooth
has been with us since 1994 in various forms. Conceived by Ericsson, the intent
was to enable low-power connectivity for everything, but it quickly became
relegated to human interface devices (HIDs) like keyboards and mice, as well as
audio. Later, hands-free mobile phones became a key application.
However,
when power-consumption issues were addressed and Bluetooth LE emerged in 2010
as part of the Bluetooth 4.0 spec, Apple added it to the iPhone 4S in 2011.
That’s when Bluetooth Smart really took off.
Bluetooth
Smart differs from Classic Bluetooth (pre-Bluetooth 4.0) in a number of
important ways that make it an attractive option for low-power proximity tags.
Classic
Bluetooth radios typically draw around 40mA at 3V but best-in-class Bluetooth
Radios producing 0dBm output and draw less than 5mA at 3V, while still offering
a range of up to 50m in many environments.
Average
power consumption in some applications may be only 100th of that of Classic
Bluetooth, due to the relatively long periods during which a Bluetooth Smart
device will be in sleep mode. Wake up time is just 6ms, versus around 100ms for
Classic Bluetooth. It can send authenticated data in just 3ms, versus up to 1s
for Classic Bluetooth. It offers 128-bit banking-level security to keep data
safe.
Bluetooth Smart is actually split into two
functions: Bluetooth Smart and Bluetooth Smart Ready, the only difference is
that the “Ready” refers to the features required for the main controller
device, whether it is a smartphone or TV.
Bluetooth Smart radios are now built into
battery-powered, stand-alone devices that can be found in applications from
broadcasting advertising messages to shoppers as they come within range, to
robot trackers, and of course, fitness devices.
The modifications to Bluetooth also made it suited
to proximity-tag applications, which need to operate for up to a year on a
single coin-cell battery.
Not all Bluetooth Smart implementations are created equal
Despite the energy savings promised by Bluetooth
Smart, how the technology is implemented can have a dramatic affect on system
energy consumption and battery life. The primary criteria for choosing a
Bluetooth Smart radio system-on-chip (SoC) to form the heart of a proximity tag
are peak current consumption, energy consumption over time (taking into account
the requirements of the application), receiver sensitivity (the tags need to
receive a signal from a smartphone to know that it’s out of range), and the
ability to work from a single small battery, usually a coin cell, to minimise
size.
In real-world applications, battery life will also
depend upon the signalling interval – how often the tag is required to
transmit– so when comparing device data, it’s important to ensure that the
operating conditions under which the figures are quoted are the same, or at
least very similar.
To gain a more detailed understanding of how energy
is consumed while a tag is operating, designers need to determine the charge
consumed versus time for each transmit/receive operation. These parameters
include:
•The transmit interval and charge per transmit•The time taken and charge consumed from cold boot until the first transmit
•The time, peak current and charge consumed by each of the three transmit channels normally used
Also, you need to consider the processor resources
that may be available for application code within the Bluetooth Smart SoC. If
it’s possible to produce a completely hosted solution without resorting to an
external microcontroller, this will again save design time, cost and space.
In selecting a Bluetooth Smart radio, other
important considerations are sometimes overlooked. Functional integration will
determine how many external components are needed to create the beacon. The
fewer you need, the less design effort is required and the lower the cost of
the end product. Fewer components also means you can make smaller products that
will be more reliable. Design effort is also reduced if the Bluetooth Smart
vendor offers a reference design and proven software.
A Bluetooth Smart proximity tag reference design
A good reference design is
founded upon a solid SoC. Dialog Semiconductor’s DA14580 “SmartBond” SoC
integrates a Bluetooth Smart radio with an ARM Cortex-M0 application processor
and intelligent power management. The processor and on-chip digital and
analogue peripherals are accessible via up to 32 GPIOs
To
help get designers of proximity tags up and running quickly, the SoC is
accompanied by the SmartTag reference design (Figure 3). This offers all the
required functionality, including a LED and buzzer to provide visual and
audible signal link-loss or find-me alerts, as well as a push button to silence
the alarm. The design also supports software over the air updates (OTA) to
provide an easy way to upgrade devices that are in the field with the latest
improvements. The DA14580 runs both the application and the Bluetooth stack and
is powered from a single CR2032 battery. To save on bill of materials, only
five passive components are required for the tag’s core system: no 32kHz XTAL
is required.
The
reference design consumes 5mA peak current consumption in active mode and less
than 600nA in stand-by and comes in a typical proximity tag form factor with
schematics, layout information, user manual, a test report, source code and
SmartTags app source code.
Conclusion:
The applications of Bluetooth Smart
are many and varied thanks to the ultra-low power consumption and ecosystem
support it has received. However, designers need to move quickly as the
applications are emerging more quickly and so a good reference design is
critical to meeting the window of opportunity. Proximity tags are a classic
example, with many companies vying for attention, but many will fall by the
wayside as power consumption and reliable connectivity emerge as key
differentiators.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)