More and more, tools that we would have considered too expensive for an individual are becoming smaller, more affordable, and even portable. The Cubiio is a current Kickstarter project that is offering investors a portable laser engraver. As with any Kickstarter project, there's a risk that the project will fail and the promised hardware is never built, but there's also a possibility that the idea works too. Given the success of the project (over $1 Million dollars of funding) I hope that one day we'll see these in real life, but I suspect that it's little more than a high tech toy, a refined version of some DIY laser engravers that can already be build with some old computer parts
Intended to slow down vehicles and make it safer for pedestrians, speed bumps are found in many parking lots, near schools and churches, even some communities install them around residential neighborhoods. Despite their common use, there is no standard for these speed bumps, and even well though out bumps in the road can do some serious damage to a car regardless of its actual speed. To fix this issue, some companies are building flexible - non-newtonian speed bumps. If you travel slowly the bump could go almost unnoticed, while the faster you go the harder it will behave.
Electric powered aircraft is not a particularly new idea. Airships and ultralights have been able to use electric motors powered by anything from battery packs to solar panels for decades, but due to the weight of batteries, electric power aircraft are slow. The Solar Impulse 2, a solar powered plane, flew around the world at an average 45 miles per hour. Now however Airbus and Siemens electric are looking at developing high performance electric planes. Not just quiet and environmentally friendly, but fast and powerful.
In the last few months, their Extra 330LE has set speed records of 211 mph and shown the ability to pull another plane (with passenges) into the air. As they note in the video, they are hoping to apply these developments to both personal and commercial aircraft in the near future. If these is true, we may not hear the jets that are flying over head Engineers love to solve problems, particularly challenging ones, and Nathan Seidle, an engineer and founder of Sparkfun, loves to build robots. As a gift, his wife gave him an already locked safe (and no idea of the combination) knowing that he'd enjoy the challenge. As an engineer he did a little bit of research, some reverse engineering of the safe, and his knowledge of electronics and robotics to do the work for him. What could take a human years to try and figure out the combination, a few weeks of on and off work helped him create a machine that will try enough calculations that the safe will be open in minutes rather than years.
Is it legal? Is this ethical? In this case, Nate notes that he owns the safe and there's nothing illegal, its almost like you forgot your password for your own email account. He also points out that by informing the safe manufactures of the security flaws he and others could use, we can actually be helping out the design and development of better security systems. And safe cracking isn't much different from lock picking, which can actually be a competitive sport (as long as you aren't trying to break into some one else's property) |
Mr. WelkerTechnology Teacher at Southeast Raleigh High School. Archives
October 2019
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