Schogini

ScienceDaily (May 3, 2012) — A doorknob that knows whether to lock or unlock based on how it is grasped, a smartphone that silences itself if the user holds a finger to her lips and a chair that adjusts room lighting based on recognizing if a user is reclining or leaning forward are among the many possible applications of Touché, a new sensing technique developed by a team at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Touché is a form of capacitive touch sensing, the same principle underlying the types of touchscreens used in most smartphones. But instead of sensing electrical signals at a single frequency, like the typical touchscreen, Touché monitors capacitive signals across a broad range of frequencies.

This Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing (SFCS) makes it possible to not only detect a “touch event,” but to recognize complex configurations of the hand or body that is doing the touching. An object thus could sense how it is being touched, or might sense the body configuration of the person doing the touching.

SFCS is robust and can enhance everyday objects by using just a single sensing electrode. Sometimes, as in the case of a doorknob or other conductive objects, the object itself can serve as a sensor and no modifications are required. Even the human body or a body of water can be a sensor.

“Signal frequency sweeps have been used for decades in wireless communication, but as far as we know, nobody previously has attempted to apply this technique to touch interaction,” said Ivan Poupyrev, senior research scientist at Disney Research, Pittsburgh. “Yet, in our laboratory experiments, we were able to enhance a broad variety of objects with high-fidelity touch sensitivity. When combined with gesture recognition techniques, Touché demonstrated recognition rates approaching 100 percent. That suggests it could immediately be used to create new and exciting ways for people to interact with objects and the world at large.”

In addition to Poupyrev, the research team included Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and Munehiko Sato, a Disney intern and a Ph.D. student in engineering at the University of Tokyo. The researchers will present their findings May 7 at CHI 2012, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in Austin, Texas, where it has been recognized with a Best Paper Award.

Both Touché and smartphone touchscreens are based on the phenomenon known as capacitive coupling. In a capacitive touchscreen, the surface is coated with a transparent conductor that carries an electrical signal. That signal is altered when a person’s finger touches it, providing an alternative path for the electrical charge. By monitoring the change in the signal, the device can determine if a touch occurs.

By monitoring a range of signal frequencies, however, Touché can derive much more information. Different body tissues have different capacitive properties, so monitoring a range of frequencies can detect a number of different paths that the electrical charge takes through the body.

Making sense of all of that SFCS information, however, requires analyzing hundreds of data points. As microprocessors have become steadily faster and less expensive, it now is feasible to use SFCS in touch interfaces, the researchers said.

“Devices keep getting smaller and increasingly are embedded throughout the environment, which has made it necessary for us to find ways to control or interact with them, and that is where Touché could really shine,” Harrison said.

Sato said Touché could make computer interfaces as invisible to users as the embedded computers themselves. “This might enable us to one day do away with keyboards, mice and perhaps even conventional touchscreens for many applications,” he said.

Among the proof-of-concept applications the researchers have investigated is a smart doorknob. Depending on whether the knob was grasped, touched with one finger or two, or pinched, a door could be programmed to lock or unlock itself, admit a guest, or even leave a reply message, such as “I’ll be back in five minutes.”

In another proof-of-concept experiment, they showed that SFCS could enhance a traditional touchscreen by sensing not just the fingertip, but the configuration of the rest of the hand. They created the equivalent of a mouse “right click,” zoom in/out and copy/paste functions depending on whether the user pinched the phone’s screen and back with one finger or two, or used a thumb.

The researchers also were able to monitor body gestures, such as touching fingers, grasping hands and covering ears by having subjects wear electrodes similar to wristwatches on both arms. Such gestures could be used to control a smartphone or other device.

They also showed that a single electrode attached to any water vessel could detect a number of gestures, such as fingertip submerged, hand submerged and hand on bottom. Sensing touch in liquids might be particularly suited to toys, games and food appliances.

The Arduino Wireless shield allows your Arduino board to communicate wirelessly using Zigbee. This documentation describes the use of the shield with the XBee 802.15.4 module (sometimes called “Series 1″ to distinguish them from the Series 2 modules, although “Series 1″ doesn’t appear in the official name or product description).

A Simple Example

You should be able to get two Arduino boards with Wireless shields talking to each other without any configuration, using just the standard Arduino serial commands (described in the reference).

To upload a sketch to an Arduino board with a Wireless shield, remove the Xbee. Then, you can upload a sketch normally from the Arduino environment. In this case, upload the Communication | Physical Pixel sketch to one of the boards. This sketch instructs the board to turn on the LED attached to pin 13 whenever it receives an ‘H’ over its serial connection, and turn the LED off when it gets an ‘L’. You can test it by connecting to the board with the Arduino serial monitor (be sure it’s set at 9600 baud), typing an H, and pressing enter (or clicking send). The LED should turn on. Send an L and the LED should turn off. If nothing happens, you may have an Arduino board that doesn’t have a built-in LED on pin 13 (see theboard index to check for sure), in this case you’ll need to supply your own.

Once you’ve uploaded the Physical Pixel sketch and made sure that it’s working, unplug the first Arduino board from the computer. Change the switch to the Micro setting. Now, you need to upload a sketch to the other board. Make sure its switch is in the USB setting. Then upload the following sketch to the board:

void setup()
{
Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop()
{
Serial.print('H');
delay(1000);
Serial.print('L');
delay(1000);
}

When it’s finished uploading, you can check that it’s working with the Arduino serial monitor. You should see H’s and L’s arriving one a second. Turn off the serial monitor and unplug the board. Change the switch to the Micro setting. Now connect both boards to power. After a few seconds, you should see the LED on the first board turn on and off, once a second. (This is the LED on the Arduino board itself, not the one on the Xbee shield, which conveys information about the state of the Xbee module.) If so, congratulations, your Arduino boards are communicating wirelessly.

A Few Notes

You can use any of the standard Arduino serial commands with the Xbee shield. With the switch in the Micro position, the print and println commands will send data over the Xbee shield and the USB connection (i.e. to other Xbee shields and to the computer at the same time). In this configuration, however, the board will only receive data from the Xbee shield not from the USB connection.

The Xbee module on the shield is set up to work at 9600 baud by default, so unless you reconfigure it, you’ll need to make sure you’re passing 9600 to the Serial.begin() command in your sketch.

To allow your computer to communicate directly with the Xbee shield, connect it to an Arduino board whose microcontroller has been removed and place the switch in the USB configuration. Then you can send data to and receive data from the Xbee module from any terminal program. This allows you, for example, to see the data that the module is receiving from other Xbee shields (e.g. to collect sensor data wirelessly from a number of locations).

Configuring the Xbee Module

You can configure the Xbee module from code running on the Arduino board or from software on the computer. To configure it from the Arduino board, you’ll need to have the switch in the Micro position. To configure it from the computer, you’ll need to have the switch in the USB position and have removed the microncontroller from your Arduino board.

To get the module into configuration mode, you need to send it three plus signs: +++ and there needs to be at least one second before and after during which you send no other character to the module. Note that this includes newlines or carriage return characters. Thus, if you’re trying to configure the module from the computer, you need to make sure your terminal software is configured to send characters as you type them, without waiting for you to press enter. Otherwise, it will send the plus signs immediately followed by a newline (i.e. you won’t get the needed one second delay after the +++). If you successfully enter configuration mode, the module will send back the two characters ‘OK’, followed by a carriage return.

Once in configuration mode, you can send AT commands to the module. Command strings have the form ATxx (where xx is the name of a setting). To read the current value of the setting, send the command string followed by a carriage return. To write a new value to the setting, send the command string, immediately followed by the new setting (with no spaces or newlines in-between), followed by a carriage return. For example, to read the network ID of the module (which determines which other Xbee modules it will communicate with), use the ‘ATID command:

To change the network ID of the module:

Now, check that the setting has taken effect:

Unless you tell the module to write the changes to non-volatile (long-term) memory, they will only be in effect until the module loses power. To save the changes permanently (until you explicitly modify them again), use the ATWR command:

To reset the module to the factory settings, use the ATRE command:

Note that like the other commands, the reset will not be permanent unless you follow it with the ATWR comamand.

References

For more information, see: the hardware page for the Xbee shield, and the Digi Xbee page. The text of the Arduino getting started guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Code samples in the guide are released into the public domain.

When electricity and a flash of light is passed the organic molecules pull together to form tiny conduits that conduct electricity as efficiently as metals do. The scientists say that the conductive organic nanowires could be useful for making low-cost electronic circuits like LED,Transistors,solar cell etc.

The advantage of such films is that they can be turned into ink and printed on pliable substrates. The wiring that strings the devices into a circuit, however, is metal, a material that is difficult to process, expensive, and brittle.

As devices and circuits shrink, using organic interconnects would be easier than building metal ones and would lead to truly flexible low-cost electronics. The metallic part of the organic circuit is made of a organic material [that conducts like metal], which will make it lighter, softer, and more cost-effective.

If your phone doesnt show anything when you connect an external usb disk then you need to reconfigure the USB Adapter’s pin outlet.

1 VCC Red +5 V
2 D− White Data −
3 D+ Green Data +
4 ID none Mode Identification
5 GND Black Ground

LapDock:
+5V and GND connected directly to the battery of the LapDock, TX+RX connected to the integrated USB HUB.

Docking Station:
+5V and GND connected directly to external power (5V AC), TX+RX connected to the integrated USB HUB.

Oh, in BOTH, for enabling the Host Mode, pins 4 and 5 are shortcircuited, exactly as the USB OTG specifications.

Scientists are building a telescope that they say “will transform our understanding of the universe”, and will take the equivalent of 800,000 images by an eight-mega pixel camera every night but of a vastly superior quality.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is being put together by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the U.S, which boasts in a statement that it “will capture the widest, fastest and deepest view of the night sky ever observed”.

This is because it packs a 3.2billion-pixel camera that will survey the entire visible sky every week, creating an unprecedented public archive of data – about six million gigabytes per year.

Its deep and frequent cosmic vistas will help answer critical questions about the nature of dark energy and dark matter and aid studies of near-Earth asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, the structure of our galaxy and many other areas of astronomy and fundamental physics.

With 189 sensors and over three tons of components that have to be packed into an extremely tight space, you can imagine this is a very complex instrument.

If all continues as planned, construction on the telescope will begin in 2014. Preliminary work has already started on LSST’s 8.4- metre primary mirror and its final site atop Cerro Pachon in northern Chile. As the primary component of all energy in the universe, the still-mysterious dark energy is perhaps the most important research target for LSST and the physicists who are building it.

Snakebots are robots that move like a snake to slither around and over obstacles.
The snakebot was developed to be able to travel over any terrain and collect data on other planets.
Unlike other robots NASA has used, the snakebot will be able to burrow under the ground and collect samples from different soil levels. The snakebot will even be able to move in and out of cracks in the planetary surface.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The snakebot is made up of up to 30 different segments, much like the vertebrae of a snake. Each segment contains mechanical components which are controlled by sensors and small computers. A central computer controls most of the movement and commands for the entire robot. The software written for the snakebot communicates information from the sensors to the central computer telling it that the segment is touching something. The central computer will determine the direction or action the segment should take to overcome the obstacle. Software is being developed that will “learn”, allowing the snakebot to make determinations on how to correct movement depending on the type of terrain it encounters.

The snakebot will be covered in an artificial skin, allowing it to withstand extremes of temperature and make it water resistant.

The snakebot is the lightest of all the explorer robots and can be stored in a relatively small space, taking up less weight and less room in the spacecraft. It also does not require a ramp to deploy it onto the planetary surface.

Another great feature of the snakebot is that it is easily repairable in space. Space segments can be on hand for repair if needed.

Equipped with cameras, sampling mechanics, and environmental sensors the snakebot will be a valuable tool in space exploration.

Ultra sonic frequency, low amplitude vibrations between two flat plates have been shown to create a squeeze film of air between the two plate surfaces thereby reducing the friction. Here, it is shown that a reduction of friction will also occur between a human finger and a vibrating plate. Thus, a vibrating plate can serve as a haptic interface. The amplitude of vibration can also be correlated to the amount of friction reduction the plate and the finger. Varying the surface friction between the finger and the haptic interface is a way of indirectly controlling shear forces on the finger during active exploration. Using finger position and velocity feedback on the display allows for the creation of spatial texture sensations.

Femtocells, a technology little-known outside the wireless world, promise better indoor cellular service. In telecommunication, a Femtocell is a small cellular base station, typically designed for use in a home or small business. It connects to the service provider’s network via broadband. Current designs typically support 2 to 4 active mobile phones in a residential setting, and 8 to 16 active mobile phones in enterprise settings. A Femtocell allows service providers to extend service coverage indoors, especially where access would otherwise be limited or unavailable. For a mobile operator, the attractions of a Femtocell are improvements to both coverage and capacity, especially indoors. This can reduce both capital expenditure and operating expense.

A Femtocell is typically the size of a residential gateway or smaller, and connects into the end-user’s broadband line. Once plugged in, the Femtocell connects to the MNO’s mobile network, and provides extra coverage in a range of typically 30 to 50 meters for residential Femtocells.

The end-user must declare which mobile phone numbers are allowed to connect to his/her Femtocell, usually via a web interface provided by the MNO. When these mobile phones arrive under coverage of the Femtocell, they switch over from the Macrocell (outdoor) to the Femtocell automatically. Most MNOs provide means for the end-user to know this has happened, for example by having a different network name appear on the mobile phone. All communications will then automatically go through the Femtocell. When the end-user leaves the Femtocell coverage (whether in a call or not), his phone hands over seamlessly to the macro network.

Adaptive photonic based phase locked elements (APPLE) is Raytheon’s DARPA development initiative. The initiative is for development of a directed energy weapon that utilizes a beam combining technique for the achievement of high power. It will integrate the laser enabled weapon applications into unmanned aerial vehicles. The APPLE program is to enable all electronic combining of high-power laser engraver beams within an agile, conformal aperture-a practical approach to synthesizing high-power weapon laser engravers from low-power modules for applications such as laser radar, laser target designation, laser communications, and weapons grade lasers. The idea is to provide electro-optical systems with the same mission flexibility and performance that microwave phased arrays provide for RF applications such as radar and electronic warfare systems.