Bench Talk

Humanity has streamlined the process of manufacturing several times over the course of its history. First, we channeled water and steam to mechanize production. Then we learned to harness electrical power for mass production. Next, electronics and information technology helped us increase automation. Now with 3-D design and printing, we’re able to blend the physical, virtual, biological, and chemical.

On the surface, it appears to be among the simplest of games. An austere board marked with a 19 x 19 grid, where two players take turns placing black or white pieces. The rules are brutally simple: capture enemy pieces by surrounding them with your own; capture the most territory to win. But the game of Go has a 2,500 year history, 1,000 years longer than chess, and is a far more complex challenge than that younger game. Until recently, its upper ranks were considered beyond the reach of computers. A machine that could challenge the best players was seen as the holy grail of games-playing artificial intelligence (AI).

The buzzword “innovation” has become something of a mantra for the technology sector, designed to stimulate the out-of-the-box thinking needed to come up with winning products against ever tougher competition. But innovation is perhaps as wrong a mantra today as it was in the seventeenth century when, according to an article in The Atlantic, innovators were more likely to have their ears cut off and be thrown into jail than celebrated. What we need today, more than ever, is not innovation, but invention.

Because virtual reality required quite a large amount of computing power, and the technology was very expensive, it never really took hold. Until 2012 that is, when the small startup Oculus introduced the first head mounted display with a visual field of 90 degrees. Now, with many other companies developing HDMs, the technology is more affordable, therefore spreading into different industries.

The complexity of IoT extends beyond simple projects. If you were to take all the useful data and manipulate it, you could find patterns that point to changes that can increase productivity, reduce wait times, or point to trends that help improve processes or locate potential failures.

Like most people, I suspect, when quadcopters first appeared my first thoughts were about how totally cool they are followed by, “Gee, what could I do with one?” So it’s not surprising that terrorists have asked the same question and have come up with an obvious answer: Make flying Radio-Controlled Improvised Explosive Devices (RC-IEDs), which the U.S. Central Command believes they are already working on and have possibly developed.

In my last column I explored realistic and unusual ways to generate “green” electric power or biofuels. This time it’s no hold barred, featuring a collection of the good, the bad, and the truly ugly. So feast your eyes on this tempting assortment.

I was an intern at Mouser this past summer, and this is my last week before I go back to school. Coming into this internship, I would never have imagined that I would be asked to fly across the country and represent Mouser at one of the biggest technology showcases in the world. I thought I would be writing a blog or an article every now and then while designing some sort of project by the end of the summer. Every engineering student needs some hands-on design experience on their resume, and that means spending time developing some quirky product that stands out among the droves of other students interviewing at major tech companies.

Those of us of a certain age survived in the period before the Internet, yet, such has been the transformative power of the technology, even we have difficulty working out how. But today’s Internet is just the beginning; extending it to billions of tiny, inexpensive sensors that continuously generate useful data will exponentially multiply the network’s power and its influence over daily life.

Before a single piece of steel is forged or a circuit board is sent to the fab, engineers rely heavily on 3D models to understand their designs in virtual reality before committing vast sums of money and time in actually building them. But now you don’t have to be a multi-million-dollar design firm to take advantage of this technology. The cost of virtual reality and augmented reality is plummeting as competition in the market heats up in 2016. This means that just about anyone, including fledgling startups and makers, can get take advantage of 3D visualization.