Floating sensors… each one of which has an android phone in it, so is able to do all the things that android phones can do… like control motors, and collect data, and phone home. Bit of a heavy-duty battery setup mind… this is kindof why we need fuel cells.

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It’s a butane-powered fuel-cell… yet to be launched… allegedly due to be available this year.

The trouble with hydrocarbons is that they’re simply far better storers of energy than any other batteries. The thing above takes butane (the stuff that goes into cigarette lighters) cartridges that (also allegedly) will cost a couple of dollars each, and are good to charge a phone about 14 times.

As the Dvice blogger says though – the hell with proprietary cartridges – they’re just trying to create an artificial scarcity (I mean that is pretty much the main thing that “proprietary” is for)… so if this does come out, we need to hack it pronto-quick to use off-the-shelf fuel. The hell with patents; the hell with artificial scarcity. Businesses dependent on monopolies need to go away.

I think these things (for a while at least) are the future though… sans micro-nukes, the easiest to imagine ideal solution is some sort of solar->storage device. If I had to guess, I’d say that this will be achieved using gen-eng algae (that grows like the clappers) that has been genetically tampered with so it produces some sort of hydrocarbon (or just H2) that can be used in a fuel cell. Hydrocarbons (of the liquid variety) are easier to handle than pure hydrogen though… so I’d be guessing they’ll be the way things go.

The reason this is important (well one of the reasons) is that it will radically improve what robots are capable of… especially the flying ones.

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If you google “fuel cell” and look at the pictures though, there are dozens of “existing” products, with varying degrees of ephemerality. I’m guessing the major problem with the fuel cell above (and the probable need for cartridges) is that it needs ludicrously pure butane. Or something. Maybe I’ll be wrong – but 1/2 the things I’ve talked about on this blog have never actually happened. If you can’t buy it on Ebay, it probably doesn’t exist.

A name that turns up again and again (showing promise etc) though is Angstrom… who used to (apparently) sell fuel-cells on their web-site, but who appear now to have been bought by Bic (who make cigarette lighters) so who knows what will come of that… hard to say. Seems like a good partnership, but the amount of money Angstrom sold for doesn’t really reflect the scale of what is possible I don’t think.

There’s also a Swedish company (who’s designs I like)…

…where you can (apparently) buy them… which is a rarity with new-tech it seems – so many of these things appear to have websites that go on about “technology” and “investors” and “patents” without getting to the actual point of where you can buy the fucking things… which as far as I’m concerned reeks of Ponzi. If your customers/audience are “investors” then you’re not a business. At least this thing is a business.

The trouble with it though is that it appears to give only 2 charges per cartridge… so it costs €200 for the device, then €1 per phone charge after that. Ok if you’re in The Outback I guess… but I think what we’re really looking for is Replacing The Grid. Replacing wire.

So if I was looking for a tectonic drift here, it would be the de-wirification of electricity… The Internet Of Things is kindof about going off-grid in every respect, apart from information… because information is a different sort of grid – a decentralised web. It’s quite weird… it’s like artifacts that were (because of mycelia-like wires) kindof a single organism (with very very limited brains)… are evolving into distinct organisms, but with a single super-brain… which is a machine/human symbiote.

Probably Infographic Of The Year…

Scary thing is – this is the stuff we know about, the stuff that’s really going to make a difference is going to come out of left-field – or at least that’s been the pattern in the past. What we don’t know we don’t know is the biggest piece of the pizza.

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We’re definitely learning how to do something here aren’t we? We’re like kids playing with toys – that further down the line will have some sort of useful purpose… but right now are just a fun way of getting our motor and cognitive circuits sorted out. The feeling of Wright Brothers “early steps” is so strong it’s almost tangible… and it’s happening in a million different places at once, and it’s speeding up.

It feels like there’s some sort of consciousness (for want of a better word) shift imminent. Not in any mystic way… but in the way all these myriad daft (but still impressive) little inventions inter-relate. The network of things that they’re en-route to becoming.

This little thing on kickstarter

Which is not a million miles away from this thing

will (if it happens) be wifi-enabled… which as far as I can see, kindof puts it in the cloud. If you’ve got a thing with mobility, that has the ability to pull files from the web, and has a web-server built into it (hell, someone was trying to attach one to a fly about 10 years ago)…

… then I think we’ve got a completely new sort of organism. An organism with a million bodies and one big, really disorganised brain, filled with pornography and flame-wars and wikipedia and wikileaks and the collected confessions of a billion facebook tweeters.

And instructions on how to make itself.

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In a fairly sad, creepy sort of way.

Nice apartment though – looks exactly like this therapists place I used to go to… except without the insane blob thing. I had other issues. Probably less serious etc, in retrospect.

When you sit on one seat, it transfers your sorry arse to the other seat, but in reverse. Genius

A DOS-Box is/was… the Command Line Interface that early PCs used to use. The whole interface was one big DOS box… the Windows turned up… and the DOS box was only called into play rarely… subsequent versions of Windows further marginaliased it. It looks like this:

The trouble with DOS-Boxes is they make people’s minds go blank.

That’s why Microsoft made so much money… they brought computing to the masses by eliminating the thing that scared people off.

Soldering is the DOS-Box of electronics.

If your project requires soldering, you’ve just lost 99% of the human race.

There are actually innumerable DOS-Boxes (to varying degrees) in any type of technology that has the potential to be democratised. If people had to make their own lego blocks (with the incredibly fine tolerances involved), it would never happen. Lego does all the heavy lifting… all the low-level programming… allowing people to operate at a higher level. WordPress (which this blog is written in) has about 8 layers of this sort of thing… PHP is a language written in another (harder to understand) language for example. WordPress is written in PHP.

Anyway – most modern CAD programs are far to complicated for normal human beings to use. Forget it man, it ain’t going to happen. For CAD/CNC/Rapid-Fabbing (and therefore the open-hardware revolution) to take off, then there needs to be a lot of legoification.

There are vague movements towards this starting to emerge. One is punter-tweakablability of pre-designed-designs. This is something that Ponoko are taking a keen interest in… an example of a tweakable lampshade below:

Although… um… I can’t actually get it to go. Might be a chrome-only thing.

There’s a variant of OpenSCAD called OpenJSCAD – which allows javascript programmers to set up simple versions of this sort of thing… I made the gun barrel below… as it’s JS, it would be trivial to have drop-down parameters etc, so people could change the dimensions. The trouble with this though is that it (so far) only works with Chrome… and the resolution is dictated by the fairly low limitations of the browser. Useable… almost… but not really good enough to output directly to a machine.

A more advanced/pretty version of this is Nervous System’s DIY Jewelery App.

So I think we’re going to see a lot more of this sort of thing… all made possible by the rapidly dropping price of digital fabrication. Whether we see a microsoft-style universal set of interefaces remains to be seen… hardware is a lot more complicated than software – and that’s why a lot of this revolution is to do with making hardware problems, software problems.

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Another angle into this is legoification of electronics… a really good recent example is Tinkerforge… which is lowering all sorts of bars

Not least of which is the drift from languages like C++ and Java, to Python (and PHP?)… which are languages simple enough for the likes of me to understand. Still a code DOS-Box… but it gets rid of the soldering DOS-Box.

There is also a slightly lower-level version of this – for kids? I think – Littlebits…

And even further into ease-of-use land, there was a recent kickstarter thing that is basically a sensor block, that you “program” stimulus/response rules… which are about as complicated as email-filter rules. Twine.

I’m rapidly going off Kickstarter though – it’s turning into an outlet for established design shops to sell shiny jackdaw crap to fanboys. It’s not answering to needs, it’s answering to desires. Of wankers. That thing where those to dancing smoothies made a wallet out of two bits of metal with an elastic band around them, saying that your ability to choose different colours “made it an extension of who you are” made me throw up in my mouth… and they sold about $300,000 of them. Jackdaw fanboy crap of the type that swamped Carnaby St in the 80s. And don’t get me started on Quirky.com

Something that IS on Kickstarter though, and which is quite cool is the Open Beam project

Which not only radically brings down the cost of t-slot stuff, but which specifically makes it interfaceable with laser-cut acrylic, and circuit boards.

It’s an indiegogo project for an aquaculture system that you can put up on your roof… or backyard or whatever. Assuming you have a flat roof. The guy does a TED talk about it here:

… which gives it a little more credibility I think than the indiegogo thing, which seems to come up with unnervingly round numbers. Like 100kg per year as an estimation of fish output – that looks like a number pulled out of thin air to me, but if these guys have experience doing this stuff, then maybe not. It appears they do – website here etc.

Which does seem to be able to generate a reasonable amount of food. For a completely closed system though, you’d need to do more than feed fish effluent back into the plants (if you’re going to eat the plants/fish)… you’d also need to spray human excrement, styrofoam containers, plastic bags, heavy elements and greenhouse gases in a fine drizzle over the whole system. Bring an umbrella.

Balls to that though. I’m going to make a mini one of these with fresh-water crayfish, because most of the ideal fish are illegal in NZ. The best ones anyway – pretty much everything else in the rest of the world is a threat to native wildlife.

Here are a load of really interesting pictures (if you like this sort of thing) off Conceptual Devices, the design partner’s site. This stuff rocks – kindof needs an easily defineable BOM though… so it can be like the reprap of DIY food.

Although it would be funnier if it took the photo, then drew a picture of a squirrel or something.

I like the fact that it’s kindof a CNC arm-bot though… because I think this configuration has more potential than the cartesian design used by repraps etc today… because it can make things bigger than itself.

Anyway, I found that video when I was looking at this pneumatic robot-hand