gene-h

22 ms·

181.
by gene-h 7y ago
I wonder if there are any uses for mechanically modulated retroreflectors today. NASA is investigating fully mechanical rovers for Venus because semiconductors do not work very well at Venusian temperatures while mechanical devices do[0]. T
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by gene-h 7y ago
I don't think anyone won the last challenge, which was for making a mechanical camera, because they kept extending the deadline. The requirements for the camera they wanted were pretty stringent. If they were willing to accept differen
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by gene-h 7y ago
It's a commercial product[0]. [0] https://www.zero-max.com/cd-adjustable-speed-drives#1
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by gene-h 7y ago
There's also DMG-LIB[0] and KMODDL[1] which contain mechanism animations along with CAD models of some mechanisms. It's been mentioned before, but thang010146's youtube channel also has many of these mechanisms, sometimes the
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by gene-h 8y ago
So with this we could make packing peanuts for pluto! Soft and squishy materials have surprisingly important applications. An O-ring not behaving squishy at cold temperatures was responsible for the Challenger disaster.[0] [0] https:/&
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by gene-h 8y ago
It will probably stick for a decent amount of time. An electroadhesive pad is a capacitor and leakage will probably be quite low.
187.
by gene-h 8y ago
Cheap ionizer power supplies from ebay and what not[0] can be used to do the same thing for $3-$10. It's best to find one that has an exposed ground wire, which can be difficult as most don't have documentation, but otherwise one
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by gene-h 8y ago
Current is more dangerous than voltage. So long as one limits the power supplied on the input, the current the output can supply should be quite small, on the order of microamps. It's not fun to be shocked by around 3 KV at low current
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by gene-h 8y ago
It makes more sense to call it a fractal rather than a pile. In the paper they reference, it is suggested that particles can form fractal like structures through a diffusion limited aggregation process[0]. One very important result in plane
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by gene-h 8y ago
Another interesting idea in this domain is to use wind power rather than solar power. Wind gradients can be harnessed through dynamic soaring although this can be a bit limiting. One way we might get around this is by flying two airplanes
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by gene-h 8y ago
The big problem with stereolithography resins is that they tend to degrade with time, especially if left in the sun. Photocuring is carried out by creating free radicals to induce polymerization. Well it turns out that these same free radic
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by gene-h 8y ago
Something similar was proposed back when 3d printing as we know it today was getting started in the 1980s. Two lasers were shined through a photocurable resin so that the resin would cure at the interesection[0](see figure 9). In practice i
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by gene-h 8y ago
Now what I'd really like to know is if these boots can actually decrease the metabolic cost of running at these speeds.
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by gene-h 8y ago
Fortunately, the military industrial complex has the solution to this. For some time now, there have been worries over lasers being used to blind sensors and people so a number of approaches have been developed to defend against this. Laser
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by gene-h 8y ago
There is also the field of non-moving parts fluidic devices[0] which did find some industrial applications and might even be in use today. Unfortunately, because they have no moving parts there's not much to see when they are in operat
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by gene-h 8y ago
> Where did they get a shaft encoder with over a million counts per rev? they use about 200 tick encoders, but instead of measuring on or off they measure light intensity. Because each encoder slot has a bit of variation they get absolut
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by gene-h 8y ago
It depends on the 3d printer. Object Connex 3d printers, which use an inkjet to spray resins of different stiffness can do this. A number of different stiffnesses are possible by mixing different hard and soft resins together. Really the on
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by gene-h 8y ago
The materials may be cheap, but the printer's time probably will not be.
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by gene-h 8y ago
It's difficult to couple hard and soft components. The difference in stiffness creates stress concentrations that lead to the interface failing. This is also why rubber pads on laptops always tend to fall off. Creating a gradual change
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by gene-h 8y ago
Many of these approaches for cleaning up nuclear waste from legacy nuclear sites may also be useful for fusion reactors. I talked with one of the people working on building robots for Sellafield and one of their other projects was building
201.
FLODAC: a pure fluid digital computer [pdf](computer.org)
2 points by gene-h 8y ago|0 comments
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by gene-h 8y ago
So peak power is around 600 watts, power supply efficiency is 82%, and voltage is 40.3 KV. So amperage is 0.82*600 watts/40.3 KV=~ 12 milliamps. It's not necessarily fatal[0], but it's not going to be a good day either. In ge
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by gene-h 8y ago
While making interesting constructs in cellular automata is a fun exercise, there is the possibility that the constructs might be useful in the real world. In the near term, it is much easier to make a molecular scale cellular automata than
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by gene-h 8y ago
It's not just metals you can smelt, you can also smelt silicon from rocks. It ends up in a melt of iron and silicon, but one could potentially separate out the silicon and use it to make solar cells.[0] Which can then be used to power
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by gene-h 8y ago
I can't recommend this more. Especially because the CRTs aren't made any more and eventually all of the current ones will die.
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by gene-h 8y ago
TBMs are heavy. While the Boring Company TBM can fit inside a BFR, the BFR does not have enough payload capacity to lift it. The TBM weighs around 1100 metric tons[0], while BFR's payload capacity is 100 metric tons. Water ice has only
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by gene-h 8y ago
Robots are not very good at manipulating things, especially things that are flexible or things with a variety of shapes. So one of the biggest problems that ingredients don't come in standardized containers. So either one has to sell e
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by gene-h 8y ago
"Autodesk is supplying the cloud services that will power the bridge’s data collection and processing" So the first question is what happens when all these services eventually become obsolete over the bridges life time or if aut
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by gene-h 8y ago
Another interesting thing about these rovers is that they are fully autonomous. They decide on where to explore the asteroid on their own using stereocameras, photodiodes, accelerometers, gyroscope, and temperature sensors.[0][1] In the las
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by gene-h 8y ago
The maze example required a special shaped substrate to achieve motion, this work achieved droplet motion without a shaped substrate

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