Popular Mechanics Wish list 2007

No, its not a repeat of my previous post from Popular Mechanics. This time of year, many publications are bringing out their “Top 10, Top 50 or Top 100” lists. I have already featured such lists from Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. Now Popular Mechanics have brought out their wish-list for 2007 of must-have stuff they would like in their Christmas stockings. Here’s some of them:
First up is the Kawasaki Vulcan 1600 Mean Streak. It’s a beauty of a cruiser, built for long distance and plenty of punch. A 1,552cc liquid cooled engine, rubber mounted to reduce vibration, with digital fuel injection is what you get for your $11,000. http://www.kawasaki.com/Products
Next up is the Sennheiser RS 130, wireless headphone set. You’ll say “what’s so special about a wireless headset”. Well these come with amazing built-in surround sound technology, for your late-night movie watching, when you don’t want to wake the kids (or the wife). http://www.sennheiserusa.com/
Watch out for the Suunto t3. If you’re an athletic person and love competitive sports, then this is the watch for you. It measures training intensity, heart rate and other data; and can track speed and distance with add-on "pods" such as a GPS unit. Suunto also have a range of other watches for various sports, even for serious golfers. It also allows you to download the data to your pc for further analysis. http://www.suunto.com/suunto/
Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel. Just the thing to go with your brand new Xbox. And its wireless! It also comes with gas and brake pedals to complete your virtual driving experience. Also available is the wireless headset or wireless controller. http://www.xbox.com
Fujifilm FinePix F30 Camera. Its a 6,3 megapixel using super CCD HR Technology. One of the best features is its low-light ISO 3200 capability at full resolution. http://www.fujifilmusa.com/JSP
Dyson Root 6. This is more than your average hand-held vacuum cleaner, and would not look out of place in any industrial janitor’s closet. It is apparently much faster and has stronger suction than any other hand-help on the market. http://www.dyson.com/range/
Lastly, the Wild West Gun Slinger Target Shooting Set. A very cool toy, which launches cans and bottles in the air as you hit the sensors with an infrared beam from the gun from up to 30 feet. http://www.wildwestgunslinger.com
I certainly would not mind any of these items arriving via Santa! What do you think?

Habitat of the future

Ok, now that you have the Tesla (see previous post), you need a cool house to go with it. Enter the Trilobis 65. This habitat, as they call it, is more than you would expect of a normal house. Firstly it looks like a spaceship cum bathyscape cum futuristic powerboat. It is a semi-submerged dwelling about 20meters in length and was designed to accommodate six people. The Trilobis 65, will be self-sufficient and non-polluting. It was designed by Giancarlo Zema an Italian Naval architect and named after Trilobiti, small sea-creatures that used to live in the sea a long time ago. According to him “The shape of Trilobis 65 is made to allow the creation of an artificial island.(see picture) The linking up of multiple Trilobis 65 units would create a ring-like an insular village connected to the land by gangway. Basically a small floating community.” It has four levels reachable via a spiral staircase. The upper level is about 3 and half meters in above sea-level, and two of the levels are below sea level. It is about 13meters wide and for power you have the following options: Ballard fuel cells , solar, wind, and diesel. It reaches a speed of 7 knots, so not really a power boat! The top level consists of the driving deck, housing the helm, communications equipment and navigation gear. It also has the best view of the sea at about 3 meters. The big curved glass window has a dial which alters the tint or turns it completely black. The power for this comes from solar panels embedded in the skin of the craft. Should this not be available because of night-time or clouds, it draws power from the batteries. The third level is called the “day” area and contains the modern kitchen, dining area and three seating groups. From here, sliding doors also open onto a teak deck. The next level is the “night” zone. This level has two single and two double bedrooms, each with a private bathroom. It is also about a meter under the water level and also houses the ships propulsion system, consisting of two 224kw electric motors. They are powered by the above-mentioned Ballard fuel cells. Now comes the best part: the lowest level. It is the observation bulb. This is 3meters below the surface and has a 360 degree view of the ocean. It has a range of 200w spotlights mounted on the outside for times when there is not enough sunlight to illuminate the surrounding sea-life. All this could be yours for a mere $5 million. It will go nicely with the Tesla and will be available from 2007.
Watch this space for the Jelly-fish 45 and Neptus 60, also designed by the same team.

Tesla Roadster

You might remember this car from the post I did on the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards. The Tesla Roadster was one of the award winners. Now this is a truly amazing car. The guys in white lab-coats have been talking about electrical cars for a very long time. Every now and then you would read about one, but normally they will have some sort of drawback. Either very slow, or very heavy or too expensive for commercial production, or the range is too short. Not this one though. Listen to this: It’s a two-seater that’s hundred percent electric, not a hybrid, full electric. It does 0 to 100 km/h in about four seconds, using 185kw of power up to 13000rpm. It has a top speed of 210km/h and has an equivalent fuel efficiency of 1.75 l/100 km. “What!” I hear you say. Yes, and that’s not all folks, if you dial now, you can’t get one until 2008 because they are sold out for 2007 at $100000 each. After about a three and a half hour charge, you have a range of about 400km. The energy system is a custom microprocessor-controlled lithium-ion battery pack that weighs about 450kg. The battery consists of 6,831 lithium ion battery cells configured in a pack that can be charged at any time. You get a home-charging unit and a mobile-charging kit that plugs into any normal wall-outlet when you’re on the road. The website says this about the Tesla: “With one moving part in the motor, no clutch, and two gears… There is no motor oil to change; no filters, belts, or spark plugs to replace… the only service we recommend for the first 100,000 miles is brake and tire service.” Wouldn’t you just love that for your car? See here for a complete list of standard features. It is more than many other roadsters out there. As far as the design goes a lot of it comes from the Lotus Elise, but just modified a little. The car will be assembled at the Lotus factory in Hethel, England.
Do you need any more reasons to like this car? Is it something we’ll see more of on the roads in the future? Most definitely. Especially with fossils fuel rapidly being depleted and pollution, this is the future of automobiles!

Popular Science’s Top 100 Innovations of 2006

Every year, Popular Science Magazine publishes their 100 top innovations of the year.
They have 10 categories namely: Automotive, Computing, Gadgets, Home Entertainment, Personal Health, Aviation & Space, Engineering, General Innovation, Home Tech and Recreation. Here are the winners in the respective categories:
Automotive: Bugatti Veyron 16.4. The fastest production car ever with 746kw output! Built by Volkswagen and sold at a loss of almost $1.5 million! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugatti_Veyron
http://www.bugatti-cars.de/bugatti/index.html
Computing: One Laptop Per Child. The goal of OLPC, a non-profit organisation, is to provide each child a laptop, especially in developing countries. It costs only $130. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$100_laptop
http://www.laptop.org/
Gadgets: Sony Reader PRS-500. On the way to no more paper! Download your favourite books onto this baby and empty your shelves! http://www.learningcenter.sony.us/assets/pa/prs/index.html
Home Entertainment: Nintendo Wii. They went back to the drawing-board with the controls of this gaming console: less is more in this case. It only uses a couple of buttons that doesn’t take you years to master. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii ; http://wii.nintendo.com/
Personal Health: Custom Grown Bladders. None of the patients that received newly built bladders, built from their own cell tissue, had organ rejection problems! http://www.wfirm.org/
Aviation & Space: QinetiQ and Surrey Satellite Technology Topsat. A fridge-size spy satellite, which uses a new folded-optics camera will be very popular as they are small and inexpensive as far as satellites go. http://www.sstl.co.uk/index.php?loc=114; http://www.qinetiq.com/
Engineering: Beijing National Swimming Center. The official swimming facility of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China will not contain a single piece of steel or concrete. It will use network of steel pipes linked together by 12,000 load-bearing nodes. http://www.arup.com/eastasia/project.cfm?pageid=1250
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_National_Aquatics_Center
http://en.beijing2008.com/72/79/article211987972.shtml
General Innovation: HP Memory Spot. It’s a two-millimeter-square chip that has half a megabyte of flash memory and can swap all its data in less than a second. You will be able to read data (including music and video files) off it using devices such as iPods for instance. It transmits data via a tiny built-in antenna over high-frequency radio waves. http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2006/jul-sept/memoryspot.html
Home Tech: Bostitch HurriQuake Nail. This nail was engineered to withstand up to 170mph winds, earthquakes and is designed to withstand being pulled and twisted out of its place by hurricanes. http://www.bostitch.com/
Recreation: Celestron Skyscout Personal Planetarium. This is the best tool for amateur astronomers. Simply point the device towards a star in the heavens and it will give you all the info you need on it. Or if you’re looking for a specific star, it will tell you where it is with blinking arrows. It incorporates a GPS, compass and determines the angel it is being held at. http://www.celestron.com/skyscout/new/
These are honestly some of the most brilliant innovations I have ever seen and will definitely be posting on some of these items in the future. These things are one of the main reasons why I started this blog. Call me a nerd, but I find it very exciting!
See also my post on the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards.

Dude, where's my car?

A US company called Robotic Parking systems Inc. has developed a multi million Dollar automated garage. It is quite brilliant. You drive your car onto a metal pallet structure. It then takes your car up to the next available space (be it 5 stories up) on steel wheels and tracks and lifts, slotting it in place like a huge filing system (see the picture). Before it “parks” your car, it also rotates it 180 degrees, to make it easier when you need your car again. It also uses AI to analyse trends, reshuffling cars according to customer usage, so as to reduce return times when you need your car again. It saves so much space that you can fit almost double the amount of cars that a normal parking garage can take. “Is it safe?” you ask. Well, a Jeep and a Cadillac once fell of it…! But it seems they ironed out the problem subsequently.
Here is the most amazing part: It’s run on an off-the-shelf PC with Windows NT as an operating system! It uses General Electric hardware with open source software called Simplicity.
Another positive spin-off is that it reduces car theft and robberies that normally take place in parking garages to zero, simply because drivers don’t even enter the garage. Apparently, they are looking at automating it even further, whereby as you approach the garage, a card (which you place in the windscreen) is detected by the garage’s systems, and automatically readies the pallet. Upon return, the system again recognises the card and as the driver approaches, fetches the car and gets it ready for the driver to just get in and drive off. I recall a scene from iRobot, where detective Spooner (Will Smith) parks his car (a futuristic Audi) at the pavement. The car is then taken into an automated garage, similar to what is described here! The future is here.
No more wandering around looking for your car!

PS. So as not to get sued for plagiarism, the credit for this post’s heading goes to this article.

Firefly – First “Gadget of the month”

This is the launch of a new section to this blog: the Gadget of the month. In the last week of every month I will do a post on cool tools, gadgets and related things.
The very first one to feature here, is the Firefly. Its made by a company called Guyot Designs and was invented by Eric Goldfarb. This gadget turns any wide-mouthed bottle into a lantern. So whether you go camping or during a power-outage or a braai, this will be of great help. And did I mention it’s cool? It’s essentially a lid with LED light that generates a warm glow throughout the bottle and the level of brightness can be varied. It can be used any side up as the electronics are sealed inside the lid, so you can hang it out on a tree branch and leave it there even when the rain starts. It might not be there the next morning because you neighbour swiped it! And because its LED, it does not use much power either.
Its got seven LED’s and runs on three AAA batteries that will last for about 25 hours. All you do is fill your bottle with water, and you’ll be amazed at the brightness. Its definitely on my shopping list for Christmas!
If you have any suggestions for “Gadget of the Month”, please feel free to comment here.

Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards 2006

This post is a bit long, I know, but its necessary. Here's why: PopularMechanics.com has just released their Breakthrough Awards for 2006. According to Wiktionary, “breakthrough” means: “major progress; any great innovation or discovery, especially one that overcomes some obstacle”. This sums up exactly what these awards are about. I think the rate of major innovation has exponentially increased over the years, so much so, that nowadays, there are several discoveries every year, be it on technological, medical or any other grounds. Here’s some of my favourites:
Final Frontiersman: Breakthrough Leadership Award Winner: Burt Rutan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burt_Rutan; http://www.scaled.com. For potentially making space travel cheap enough and safe enough for ordinary people to experience.
The Charger: Innovators: Martin Eberhard and team. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster; http://www.teslamotors.com. For building an electric sports car that can propel the car 250 miles between charges.
The Robo-Husky: Innovators: Marc Raibert and team. http://www.military.com/; http://www.gizmag.co.uk/go/5305/. For developing the BigDog robot that can go places that wheels and tracks can't go, with lifelike motion.
Gyro Bike: http://www.thegyrobike.com/. Innovators: Deborah Sperling, Hanna Murnen, Nathan Sigworth, Augusta Niles. To help kids learn to ride a bike, the team placed a flywheel inside the front wheel of a 16-incher. Bikes stay upright partly because the fast-moving wheels act as gyroscopes, which resist tipping.. In the GyroBike, a metal disc in the center of the wheel spins quickly, even when the rim is rolling slowly over the ground.
Pruning: Black & Decker Al ligator. A 4.5-amp motor and 6-in. chain saw bar help the tool cut through 4-in. diameter branches. www.blackanddecker.com
Robotics: Lego Mindstorms NXT. The NXT uses 32-bit processing, Bluetooth antennas, servos and sensors to help robots see brightness, hear commands and perceive movement. www.mindstorms.lego.com
Safety: Sawstop Contractor's 10-IN. SAW. The Contractor's Saw has a sensor that can detect a finger contacting the moving blade. The saw then stops in 3 to 5 milliseconds — reducing a probable amputation to a forgettable cut. www.sawstop.com

Aren’t these brilliant? Burt Rutan said in his acceptance speech :” I hope to see—by having this flourish of activity, and having every kid know…. And I think we're within 10 or 15 years of this…. Every kid will know that if he wants to, he can go to orbit in his lifetime. We're not there yet, but I believe in about that amount of time that that will be the prevailing thinking, and that in itself will drive kids into science and engineering instead of into all those really bad stuff, like lawyers.”

I can’t wait to see what humankind will come up with next! (Watch this space for follow-up posts on some of these winners individually.)

Vorsprung Durch Technik

I was just invited to have a look at a friend’s brand new Audi Q7. It is the 4,2l V8 Quattro. I am speechless. This is the most sophisticated machinery I have ever been allowed to touch. For starters, it looks smooth and elegant. It doesn’t appear big from the outside, but it is really big on the inside. And its got everything you can think of. Name it. SatNav, built-in phone, optional TV tuner, fold-down trays behind the front seats, leg space, leather, wood-inlays, and the list is endless. It about 5m long and 2 m wide, so it’s big. Everything works with voice prompts, you press a button on the steering wheel, and say something like “phone”, and it opens the phone display on the centre of the dashboard. The same display changes to a camera when you reverse, so that you can see behind you. It also shows lines of where you are going, superimposed in the video image, so you know where you are “aiming”. The lines change angle as you turn the steering wheel. When you open the hatch in the back, there is a button you can press to lower the car when you want to load stuff. Also, there is a button on the hatch door that closes the door automatically when you press it. Inside, it has a four zone climate control system, so the passengers in the back have individual control. It produces 171 kW @ 4000 r/min and torque of 500 Nm @ 1750-2750 r/min, and it weighs 2300kg (this is for the TDI). It has a radar sensors that monitor the blind spot on the sides of the car and flashes a signal to the driver via flickers mounted on the inside of the mirrors, alerting the driver that a car is in its blind spot.

In all, a bloody technologically impressive car! You have to experience it yourself. Go out now and check it out!

TracLite

Well, this little tool has been indispensable since I got it in January 2006. As an It Consultant, I get to crawl into dark and unpleasant spaces often and normally forget to attach my third arm before I do so. Enter the magnetic Traclite from Tool Logic!. Check this out, its got an LED which lasts almost forever, and a swivel base, allowing you to continue your work without having to hold it between your teeth to see what you are doing. A really brilliant tool!
Every once in a while a someone actually uses their noggin and designs something you can actually use!