Friday 3 May 2013

The incredible wide-angle camera inspired by a bug’s eye

Insects such as bees and flies see brilliantly through thousands of lenses in their “compound eyes.”
Wouldn’t that technique make a good digital camera?
Yes it would, according to the arthropod-inspired researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Writing in Nature, they say they’ve developed a digital camera with 180 tiny lenses that broadens a camera’s field of vision to 160 degrees - practically the entire panorama in front of a photographer. Now that’s a wide-angle camera.
The prototype has an “immense” depth of field - the portion of a photograph that is in focus - the BBC reports, noting, however, that it does not yet deliver high resolution because the pixel count is low.
The 180 lenses sure outnumber the single lens that defines digital photography today. But this technology ain’t seen nothing yet. A fly can have about 28,000 small eyes, and “that’s the direction we want to move in,” team researcher Jianliang Xiao from the University of Colorado told the BBC.
For those of you who know your bug eyes, lead researcher John Rogers put it this way for Wired: “The resolution is roughly equivalent to that of a fire ant or a bark beetle … We feel that it is possible to get to the level of a dragonfly or beyond.”
Wow. Vision beyond a dragonfly’s! But what good will that do, besides wide-angle phototgraphy? Scientists from Germany’s Max-Planck-Institute imagine disaster relief applications, not necessarily as image takers. For instance, they say the lenses could help a micro aerial vehicle see and navigate its way through a collapsed building while using other sensors to detect trapped people.
Illinois’ Rogers says they could be used in surveillance cameras and also in surgical endoscopes. Imagine a fly’s eye up your, er, nose. The photography community is abuzz.

Solar outlet gives power from your windows

Could future power be more personal?

Your window might be an unlikely place to plug-in your smartphone, but a team of designers has made that possible with a novel take on the portable electronics charger.
Industrial designers Kyuho Song & Boa Oh created a solar charger called the Window Socket that suctions onto glass and converts solar energy to function like an electrical socket. The units also contain a 1,000mAh battery, which is equivalent to a smartphone’s lithium-ion. The battery takes 5-8 hours to get a fully charged.
“This product is intended to enabled you to use electricity freely and conveniently in a space restricted in the use of electricity, such as in a plane, a car, and outdoors,” the inventors wrote in a design brief. “Thus, this product was meant to draw out a socket used indoors outward. We tried to design a portable socket, so that users can use it intuitively without special training.”
News about the invention was published in Yanko Design on Friday. The Window Socket appears to use the Korean specification for wall outlets, but could become more widely available in the future, the environmental news Web site Grist speculates. Note that there’s one downside: the charge only lasts for 10 hours. The designers do not appear to have created a product Web site with any further information.
An immediately available product is the “OffGrid” solar backpack by New York startup Voltaic Systems. They are available in a variety of styles, with either built-in or detachable solar cells. The solar charger powers an internal battery that connects to devices via an integrated USB port for an output of up to 4 Watts.
A less conventional alternative comes from another New York startup, SiGNa Chemistry, a maker of miniaturized fuel cells. All that’s required to power your smartphone is a tiny chemical hydrogen cartridge and some water, or even urine. The liquid initiates a chemical reaction that generates power instantly.
(image credits: Yank Design)
Related on SmartPlanet:

Are we still waiting for smart

thermostats to outsmart us?






Americans are using less energy but are still failing to conserve energy.
That sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not. Because new homes are better insulated and heating and cooling system are more efficient, Americans burned around 10 percent fewer British thermal units to heat and cool their homes in 2009 than they did in 1993, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But during that same period, the amount of energy consumed for appliances, electronics and lighting grew by around 10 percent.
In other words, Americans’ love affair with flat-screen TVs, computers, smartphones and appliances is undoing the good work they’ve done managing the building envelope.
Fear not, say the makers of Nest, a Web-enabled, sensor-powered thermostat with an Apple pedigree that premiered to much fanfare among design fans in late 2011. The slick, small Nest uses sensors to manage heating and cooling output. Over time it “learns” user’s temperature preferences and sets itself to match them. Users can control the Nest remotely — say, they went on a ski trip and forgot to lower the thermostat before leaving — via a smartphone or computer.
The Nest isn’t the first “connected” or “smart” thermostat on the market – Ecobee and EcoFactor are two incumbents — but it was the first to garner significant attention and excitement among homeowners.
But will these reinvented thermostats really reinvent home energy management? The jury, says Alan Meier, senior scientist in the Building Technology and Urban Systems Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is still out.
“There is a big question about whether consumers will persist using any of these wonderfully convenient devices,” he says. “Each appeals to a small group who will find it convenient and will stick to them. Whether the overwhelming, unwashed majority of us will convert, that to me is still a very open question.”
After all, most homeowners have largely failed to take advantage of programmable thermostats the Nest is meant to replace. Meier was part of a study that found around half of participants did not even use the programming features, which are designed to conserve energy when occupants are sleeping or gone for long, predictable periods (as in week days).
Even more disturbing are older studies that suggest when people forego programming thermostats and instead manually turn temperatures up or down, they often save more energy.
Perhaps that will turn out to be key to the success for Nest, et al — since these gadgets provide a way to virtually turn the dial up or down from afar (or from the couch).
Therese Peffer, a program director at the California Institute for Energy and the Environment, says she was an hour into her Christmas vacation when she remembered she’d forgotten to turn her Nest down manually. “I set the temperature down to 58 [degrees] on my iPad,” she says.
The ultimate goal of connected thermostats is that they will become nodes in the smart grid, linked to smart meters and acting as portals through which utility providers can better manage energy supply and demand (this is already happening in some parts of the United States). But in the near term, connected thermostats might best programmable thermostats not because they’re easier to program, but because they’re designed to accommodate both manual and automatic settings, seamlessly.
In the long term, says Peffer, smart thermostats will track our location via our smartphones and automatically adjust the temperatures in our homes based on our location. Heating or air conditioning systems will go into energy-saving mode automatically when residents leave, but then will sense as they (or their phones) make their way back home, so the temperature reaches a desired setting when they return.
ELECTRABEL SMART THERMOSTAT WITH TOUCH

Wednesday 1 May 2013