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Once
upon a time, being a programmer entailed a steep
learning curve and serious money for components.
Then along came the BASIC Stamp, a little circuit
board that made things simpler. But BASIC Stamp
lacked computing power, couldn’t run on Macintosh
computers, and was, at about US $100, still too
expensive. What were would-be do-it-yourselfers to
do? The answer came in 2005 in the form of the
Arduino, a $30 microcontroller board that is
hastening the democratization of engineering by
letting novices do really amazing things. The
release of Google’s Android ADK, or Accessory
Development Kit, lets even beginning tinkerers
build Android apps that use a mobile phone’s
camera, motion sensors, touch screen, and Internet
connectivity to control, say, a mobile robot or a
home-automation system. Contributing Editor David
Kushner tells the story of how Arduino was born
when a physical programming professor focused on
finding an even cheaper way to let the math- and
computing-challenged bring their ideas to life.
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NTT’s
experimental distributed electric power network
proved its reliability when the larger grid left
most of Sendai in the
dark.
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Researchers at
the University of Pennsylvania’s Modular Robotics
Lab have created a robot that can build other
automatons on the fly using electromechanical
robot clusters and spray foam.
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A
microscopic strip etched out of a
silicon-on-insulator wafer oscillates when hit
with laser light. The silicon strip bends and
comes to rest in either one position (representing
a digital 0) or another (yielding a digital 1)
depending on the laser beam’s frequency.
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Crafting
operating systems for desktops, laptops, mobile
phones, and tablets keeps getting harder because
consumers increasingly demand that the features
native to one type of device appear on the others.
“Techwise Conversations” host Steven Cherry talks
with the coauthor of the upcoming book Beginning
Kinect Programming, who came away amazed after a
sneak peek at Microsoft’s soon-to-be-released,
do-it-all OS.
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A layer of
single-walled carbon nanotubes sprayed atop a thin
layer of silicone results in a flexible and
stretchable pressure sensor whose potential
applications include artificial skin for robotics
and artificial limbs for
amputees.
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Read the
brochure and see how IBM Informix TimeSeries
database software can help you realize smarter
meter benefits like reducing load times,
decreasing storage capacity needs and improving
performance. Learn more about this efficient,
effective, scalable solution.
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