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Good reasons to learn the engineering skills you never thought you'd need.
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Wednesday, September 28, 2005 |
Confessions of an Engineering Washout
I bailed out of Aerospace Engineering, yet I now work in the fairly technical field of Software Engineering which I mostly learned on my own.
I find some truth in this article.
Given any desired outcome, the environment, and the system need to be taken into consideration, in terms of how they may affect the final product.
2:38:20 PM 
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Friday, October 15, 2004 |
New propulsion concept could make 90-day Mars round trip possible.
Under the mag-beam concept, a space-based station would generate a stream of magnetized ions that would interact with a magnetic sail on a spacecraft and propel it through the solar system at high speeds that increase with the size of the plasma beam. Winglee estimates that a control nozzle 32 meters wide would generate a plasma beam capable of propelling a spacecraft at 11.7 kilometers per second. That translates to more than 26,000 miles an hour or more than 625,000 miles a day.
But to make such high speeds practical, another plasma unit must be stationed on a platform at the other end of the trip to apply brakes to the spacecraft.
Hmm. It seems to me the failure of one of these "braking" stations could lead to an in flight space tragedy ala David Bowie's "Major Tom".
3:00:40 PM
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Friday, October 8, 2004 |
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English "Microlight Instructor" and hackgineer Andy Tyler, age 35, father of 2 built a pulse jet engine out of instructions he got off the internet and attached it to a shopping cart he retrieved from a river. The liquid fueled engine glows red hot at temperatures up to 600 C. - hot enough to require a heat shield between the engine and the driver. His description: It can't go on roads, runs out of fuel after two minutes and at over 50mph becomes unstable. People think I'm off my trolley but it's exhilarating.
Amateur engineering is the wave of the future, and a revival of the past...
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1:42:37 AM
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Monday, July 5, 2004 |
Well, it isn't so much the video as the subject in this case. This guy in Germany is engaging in some interesting rocketry experiments with water pressure powered rockets, home made using soda bottles.
I have seen kits for these things in toy stores, but I figured somebody must have a page on how to make them. I found this page while searching google with a string like "water rocket homemade". And of course sasuga internet - there are many pages on this topic.
I haven't mentioned it to many people, but part of my philosophy on life now seems to include creating / building / fabricating things by myself as much as possible. It is mostly a dream as I lack a lot of the required tools and motivation, but yet I still pursue it. I think it has something to do with the frustrated engineer in me.
I sure would like to build some water rockets...
11:05:42 PM
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Thursday, April 22, 2004 |
Wheeled "Octopus" Robot platform has tactile sensors in the wheels. Pictures demonstrate how this system can overcome various obstacles. From L'Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland. (found via Boing Boing)
10:27:17 AM
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Sunday, April 4, 2004 |
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Friday, March 26, 2004 |
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We went to the Robolympics on Sunday, 21 March 2004 at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, California, USA.
Fort Mason Center is a complex of warehouse buildings on piers by the bay in San Francisco. (Upper Fort Mason is a now a Park & Residential area.) Inside the middle warehouse building, was the Herbst Pavilion - site of the Robolympics 2004. It was a sunny day, but the "natural air conditioner" of San Francisco was running: a cold breeze blew in from the Bay, making it a little chilly outside.
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The production quality of the ROBOlympics was less than perfect. My wife told me she was a little disappointed with it shortly after we got there. But this is an engineers / geek event...the most important focus is Robots, not event design. Near the entrance, there were folding tables set out with various types of robots on display, including products for sale by the "Robot Store" and other vendors.
Just beyond that were the locations for the smaller scale robotic events. You may not know that there are many different fields of robot competition, and many different robot designs for each of them. There were very simple BEAM type robots (for example: "Photovores" that compete to move to a location on a table with the most light.) Lego Robots (mostly line following robots, which use a sensor to follow a line - fastest time wins the event), Sumo robots - which struggle to push one another out of circlular table top arena, Soccer playing robots - teams of robots controlled by computers that monitor the action by video camera from above, fire fighting robots - which navigate a maze and find where a fire is, and the most traditionally humanoid robot like: boxing & wrestling robots (primarily from Japanese participants.)
In the center of the building, was the main attraction - which took the most space and made the most noise : the Robot Combat event (as seen on TV in the form of Robot Wars / Battle Bots / Robotica, etc.) This consists of remotely controlled fighting robots - some heavily armored and equipped with mechanical weapons like saw blades, hammers, lifting arms, or spinning bodies. These combat robots bash against each other, competing to knock their opponent out of commission, or at least to win by demonstrating superior aggression. The robots battle it out inside a large square arena, fenced in by a steel framed wall with Lexan plastic windows (which are very scratched and scuffed, making it difficult to take pictures of the battle.)
Like most sporting events, it is more impressive and exciting to see robot combat in person. Even my wife began to show interest after a few noisy & violent robot battles. She began to make bets with my daughter on which robot would win. It's scary when a heavyweight robot gets flung up against the Lexan windows of the arena only 2 meters away from where you are sitting. There were loud crashes, and flashes of sparks. After some battles, one of the staff threw a piece of broken metal to the crowd. The combat event was narrated by a wrestling announcer style guy wearing a tuxedo. It's too bad that this is the style of presentation that has become popularized in the U.S. I prefer the U.K. style of emphasizing more of the engineering prowess of the participants, rather than the U.S. style of appeal to the lowest common denominator.
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In the back of the building were the "Pits" where teams participating in the combat events were working on their combat machines.
My two daughters showed a lot of interest in all the robots. They wanted to look at more robot pictures on the internet after we went home. My older daughter suggested we should build one. That's just the kind of thing a dad wants to hear!
I took more photos and video, but Boing Boing has logged many links to other sites photo galleries of the event, with more and better pictures than the ones I took. Here are a few links:
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1:28:19 AM
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Friday, March 19, 2004 |
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Thursday, March 18, 2004 |
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If you haven't checked out the Mars Rover page at NASA you should do so now. (And don't ever tell me you're a "geek" if you are not interested in this!) Go get yourself a pair of red/blue 3D glasses (I have some left over from taking my daughters to Spy Kids 3D), and check out the 3D stuff.
There is another site which aggregates Mars Rover Images published by NASA.
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It's incredible to see the hi-res images from Mars. They really let you get that "you are there" feeling, What do you think? Should there be a priority for a manned mission to Mars, or is robotic exploration enough?
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10:23:34 PM
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Friday, March 5, 2004 |
At the recent party for the departure of Mr. Warmth on his journey to walk the earth, Flex Solo/Kickstand mentioned wanting to stop by somewhere on his next trip to San Diego con, to check out some powered exoskeleton project. Lots of exiting links came out in the last few days related to that very topic. Some of the videos remind me of Science Fiction movies like Robocop, or AI, where they show the video of early experiments that lead to those crazy robot powered adventures. But these are real...
- Video from Cornell Labs of walking machines - via Low Life Labs. The first walking contraption shown in the video is purely kinetic - no powered movement.
- BLEEX -Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton is a device to enable someone to carry heavy loads.
- And an oldie but goody, from Y2K: gasoline-powered boots that let you run up to 25Mph, with 13 foot strides
12:33:36 AM
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Wednesday, February 4, 2004 |
3:10:48 PM
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Monday, July 28, 2003 |
Robotic exploration of Earth!
A joint project of NASA and several participating Universities, to develop Robotic Astrobiology: consisting of a robotic exploration vehicle which roams the Chilean Atacama Desert, the most arid region on Earth looking for signs of life.
5:41:34 PM
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Tuesday, July 8, 2003 |
Gladiator Robot Looks to Join Marine Corps
The USMC is developing a robot which employs non-lethal weapons against "angry crowds". Much is made of the sinister aspect of this new development, but it seems to me an improvement over the current military means of crowd control: deploying a bunch of nervous 18 year olds with live ammunition in their guns, and telling them not to shoot anyone unless shot at first. These robots will probably be very intimidating, even if all they do is make a lot of smoke and noise.
3:22:47 PM
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'Spacewalk squad' joins humans and robots
Humans and robots worked side-by-side this summer at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston to evaluate the concept of using human-robotic teams to improve the productivity of astronauts working outside the International Space Station, other space vehicles, or on the surface of other planets.
1:34:43 AM
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Saturday, June 21, 2003 |
Modular Reconfigurable Robotics
Modular Reconfigurable Robotics is an approach to building robots for various complex tasks. Instead of designing a new and different mechanical robot for each task, you just build many copies of one simple module. The module can't do much by itself, but when you connect many of them together you get a system that can do complicated things. In fact, a modular robot can even reconfigure itself -- change its shape by moving its modules around -- to meet the demands of different tasks or different working environments.
11:37:00 PM
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© 2006 John W. Williams II
Last Update: 2/13/06; 4:10:45 PM
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