2015-06-08

Notes.

We packaged up and shipped over 1000 Public Radios this weekend, with a *ton* of help from friends, coworkers, and a handful of people who I mostly know through The Prepared. We've still got another weekend (ish) of work, but boy - after ~30 hours of work this weekend alone, I'm feeling pretty good :)

Also, a few metal powder bed fusion things I'm working on: First, my DMLS seatmast topper was put through ISO 4210-9:2014, 4.5 testing this weekend, and I should know the definitive results tomorrow. Second, I received results from the CT scan that CIMP-3D did of the seatmast topper (my same design, but printed in aluminum) that they made a month or so ago. And third, tomorrow I'm going to Addaero Manufacturing to pick up my first two EBM'd parts. I'll write all of these up in more detail soon, after The Public Radio's fulfillment is farther along.

Pathfinding.

• I strongly recommend you read part 2 of Wait But Why's Tesla series.
• Melonee Wise worked at Willow Garage, then cofounded Unbounded Robotics, and now is working on Fetch Robotics.
• The US Department of the Interior is requiring that certain parts of the drone systems they purchase be open source.
• Former Makerbot CEOs Bre Pettis (now at Bold Machines) & Jenny Lawton (now at littleBits) invested in Glowforge, which is building low cost laser cutters.
• IBM has made a series of acquisitions that seem designed to develop commercial applications for Watson.

Building.

• Here's a new one to me: Laser shock peening. Basically you direct infrared lasers at a piece of metal, and it compresses the crystalline structure and makes the test sample stronger, more durable, and more corrosion resistant.
• An interesting (if a bit long) article about a Berkeley startup that's trying to make lithium ion batteries less flammable.
• Daimler (Mercedes-Benz's parent company) says they're making lithium ion batteries for home power storage too, and it's not because Tesla announced it last month.
• If you coat power plant condensers with graphene, you can increase efficiency significantly. I'm just *waiting* for one of these graphene things to be commercialized, and this one seems like a good contender.

Logistics.

• The University of Washington continues to do cool research on low power communication (you may remember their ambient backscatter work from a year or so ago). Now, they've figured out how to power a camera by Wifi only, storing a video feed on non-volatile ferroelectric RAM.
• Alibaba is rolling out next-day produce delivery in a bunch of Chinese cities.
• It makes complete sense that there are people whose job it is to save capsized transport ships, but I had never thought about it before reading this article.

Evaluation.

• IEEE Spectrum's recap of the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
• A smart, simple post on 3D CAD systems today.
• Despite the Wait But Why post above (did you read it?), Tesla is *not* "disruptive."
• I'm glad that this article doesn't go into any of the math that's leading physicists to believe that the multiverse hypothesis might really be true.

Stuff that doesn't fit into my dumb/arbitrary categories.

• MatterFab raised $5.75M to continue building their low cost metal powder bed fusion machines.

And.

Yaskawa Motoman MH24 six-axis industrial robot
vs.
a (human) sword master.