Tech Tuesday 07/22/19 – Cool Electric Motorcycles Edition
Not much to tell today, except I expect to settle on a remodel contractor this week, so that’s good.
TT01 – Drone Shield now has a pistol-sized drone gun. Two thoughts:
- When do we get a turret mounted version to place around airports and on top of police command vehicles?
- The gun works by interfering with the frequencies drone pilots use to control the drone (forcing it experience a loss of signal and either land or RTB). What happens if the drone is a home built using a controller that utilizes frequencies nowhere near those employed by COTS drones?
The legal and practical landscape around how we deal with drones is quite fascinating.
TT02 – Speaking of drones and airports, Fraunhofer is looking to update the “Chicken Gun”
TT03 – Last week we had a discussion about dispatched autonomous vehicles. This week, we have one in service. Putting an autonomous, dispatchable bus in a retirement village is a really good idea. Makes me think of places like Sun City, AZ, which is a 55+ community, where there might be more golf carts on the road than cars (my wife’s aunt and uncle have a place there, and they let Bug ‘drive’ their golf cart around, which thrilled him to no end). Speaking of last week, the skateboard had the motors and all integrated into each wheel, kinda like this is. Reminds me of pod thrusters on tug boats.
TT04 – Looking at cucumbers to develop artificial muscles. Not the fruit (which while delicious, isn’t very exciting in this regard), but the little climbing coils.
TT05 – 3D Printing, in space. Anyone know how they deal with the micro-gravity?
TT06 – There is a small subset of the HIV infected population that can resist the disease and, while they can not eliminate it from their bodies, they can grind it to a standstill without the aid of drugs. We know how they do this, and now we know how to teach everyone else’s bodies how to do this. And if that isn’t the coolest damn thing you read all day…
TT07 – Another play on a link from last week. Before, it was messing around with black body to get electricity, this time it’s geothermal. In a similar vein, the ESA is looking at regolith bricks as thermal batteries.
TT08 – Fraunhofer again, this time they are working on a coating that will drive crime scene investigators to drink.
TT09 – Taking ferrofluids to the next level and making them permanently magnetic.
TT10 – Harley-Davidson is releasing its all electric motorcycle, which looks nice. Curtiss Motorcycles, on the other hand, is kicking around a concept that looks like something from the movie set of the old Rocketeer film. I kinda like it, but where the hell is the battery on the thing?
TT11 – Brutalism, but in a nice way?
TT12 – You just know that sneaky bugger slipped behind a dust cloud or moon and is just waiting until our back is turned before cold clocking us!
TT13 – It gets hard in the light, and goes soft in the dark! No, it’s not what you are thinking of, that works in the opposite way.
TT14 – If you were wondering what the habitat domes of our Martian colonies would be made with, wonder no more.
Photo by Watty rugby 
There’s sufficient evidence that Stanley Kubrick directed the fake moon landing film, but being a perfectionist he did it on location.
– Runcie Balspun
(Sorry, I came across that quote, and it just made me smile)Report
I read that article!Report
TT05: This paper by Made In Space makes it sound like the major adaptations were structural, and a change in software because the thickness of the printed layers varies with changes in gravity. I have seen other articles that suggest the tougher challenge for use in the ISS was capturing the outgases and the fine particulates that result from heating the plastic.
TT10: On the Curtiss motorcycle, the big silver bullet shaped thing is the battery case.Report
That would put the motor right behind it. Got it.Report
The paper is interesting, but light on the details regarding the modifications made.Report
Yeah, MIS is being pretty tight-lipped about it. OTOH, it can’t be all that hard. During parabolic-flight testing, MIS had modified commercial printers working successfully. China has 3D printed ceramics on their space station and the Russians successfully 3D printed living tissue on the ISS. The European Space Agency stopped their initial project after finishing the prototype in order to focus on the problem of printing objects bigger than the printer. That looks to resemble the robotic arm printer from last week’s post.Report
TT09: I’m trying to think of applications where a magnetic fluid would be extremely useful. One thing that comes to mind is pumping a magnetic fluid through a series of pipes surrounded by coils of wire, creating an electric generator where the magnetic rotor is replaced by a flowing magnetic fluid.
If that worked, you’d want a mechanical power source that naturally pumps or moves a fluid, such as perhaps a tide that pushes back and forth on a large membrane. A Stirling cycle engine also comes to mind, with the expansion and contraction of the working piston simply pushing a magnetic fluid back and forth through some tubes.
If you pumped the magnetic fluid with a regular pump, you’ve already got rotary motion somewhere and it would be simpler to use a regular generator.
Couldn’t they also come up with an analog to hemoglobin with rare-earth super magnets?
However, I’ve given all this about two minutes of thinking, and there may be a simple piece of math that explains why magnetic fluids won’t make good motors or generators.Report
TT01: That’s no fun. The Amazon drones are an opportunity for skeet shooting with prizes.Report
LOL!Report
Hey! There are a couple of rural communities here in my state that have had to pass laws with substantial fines to get people to stop shooting at kids’ drones.Report
There was the unfortunate spear incident.Report
Well, ya don’t see that every day. 🙂Report
Or you can do this: https://www.instructables.com/id/Build-A-Net-Gun/Report
[TT01] “What happens if the drone is a home built using a controller that utilizes frequencies nowhere near those employed by COTS drones?”
The control frequencies are mostly defined by the laws of physics; lower frequencies can’t always send data fast enough to be useful and higher frequencies need more power in the gear to get through the atmosphere and have enough range. You usually end up around K- or S-band, so a jammer can concentrate on those regions.
And, sure, you could build a drone specifically to not use those frequencies, but there aren’t off-the-shelf controllers for it, so you’re starting to build your own circuits and it’s hard to do that at a size and weight that can fit into a drone and leave it with room for anything useful.Report
That sounds reasonable. Although there is a lot of room between K & S. Do you jam everything between?Report
Well, it’s simple to add a frequency converter (up/down) to an existing drone controller and run it in any band you want, given propagation limits. That just takes a couple heterodyne mixers and filters, and they’re commonly sold to allow off-the-shelf HF ham radio sets to work in the microwave bands. I suspect most of them aren’t optimized for size and weight, however, because desk mounted equipment doesn’t usually care about those things.Report
At least on the receiver end, they’re doing some surprising things with software defined radio these days using a Raspberry Pi and front-end hardware that fits in a USB stick.Report
I’ve seen some of that, including a beautiful Raspberry Pi satellite rig (for OSCAR satellites) that used your smart phone as the interface, even turning it into a spectrum analyzer.
A frequency shifter for the Drone’s receiver would be trivial and light. Transmitting video data back probably wouldn’t be too challenging, either, considering the wide array of multi-media radio equipment that switches 802.11 networks into amateur bands.
*checks Doodle Labs*
Hrm… Their website’s home page shows flying drones and says “Licensed-band frequencies for international and government applications”, “4K video streaming from 10 km away,” mentions mesh networking, and shows industrial applications and military convoys.Report
For a couple hundred dollars you can put together a Raspberry Pi, a motor controller, a 4G LTE cellular module, and a prepaid burner SIM from your local grocery or Wal-Mart. Add a tiny USB video camera. Palm-sized and the weight is almost insignificant compared to the battery you need for a medium- or heavy-lift drone. There’s a complete open source software stack available for that hardware to build a drone controlled over the cellphone network (unlimited controller range! modest real-time video!). Completely legal from a radio frequency use perspective. The FCC takes a dim view of even the authorities jamming cell phone frequencies.
The guns are intended to stop stupid people who buy off-the-shelf drones.Report
That’s about 90% of all law enforcement right there.Report
TT11
No.
Just no.Report
The university my father taught at had a great arch program, and yet the building for that major, a brutalist work if there ever was one, was roundly hated by the arch professors.
https://flic.kr/p/b8Lt4MReport
Ewww, fix those links!Report
That one was mostly for Will Truman, since he has a strange peccadillo for Brutalism.Report
TT11-
It looks fine now, but the biggest problem with brutalism is that it does not age well in wet humid environments. The concrete always gets some sort of funk on it after a few years.Report
TT14: The aerogel Martian dome idea might have overlooked a few things.
The domes will get slowly buried with dust, and 2 or 3 inches of aerogel is going to have trouble supporting a cleaning crew. Maybe they could use hovering drones to keep the dust blown off.
The reason Mars doesn’t have surface water isn’t temperature, it’s pressure, which is about 0.006 atmospheres. If you warmed water above 32F it would just boil into steam.
Aerogels have great mechanical properties for their weight, but they don’t weigh hardly anything. The tensile strength of a good silica aerogel probably doesn’t reach 1,500 psi. That makes them virtually useless as a component of a pressure vessel, and given that the problem on Mars is the lack of pressure, all solutions will involve pressure vessels of some sort or another.Report
Proud Geek dad moment today, when Bug came out of science camp and told me how his radio controlled caterpillar used a signal below the color red.
Yep, the kid was telling me about where on the EM spectrum the toy worked.
Fist bumps and atta-boys!Report
Woohoo! That’s a big conceptual leap that a lot of adults don’t quite get.
Plus, it shows he has the fine motor skills to run electrodes into specific regions of the caterpillar’s brain. 🙂Report
I know, right?! Last weeks Summer Crash Course in Brain Surgery Camp is already paying dividends.Report
Tech and medicine or so different in that regard. If you come home and your kid has taken apart the TV and a bunch of other appliances, you think “He’s going to be an engineer!” If you come home and he’s taken all the pets apart, nobody thinks “He’s going to be a brain surgeon!”Report
LMFAO!Report