Slashdot Mirror
Nanotech Pinball and Miniature Engines
glenmark writes "Researchers at the Solid State Electronics Laboratory at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed the world's smallest pinball game. The video is fascinating. The flippers are electrostatically-actuated monocrystalline silicon cantilevers. I hope Pat Lawlor and Steve Ritchie see this. I have a feeling they would get a kick out of it." And in another nanotech story, psmears writes "Three hundred times more powerful than ordinary batteries, but much lighter and smaller? Researchers at the University of Birmingham have developed a micro-engine that will allow people to charge mobile phones using lighter fluid. Further information at Research-TV including photos and a film."
That thing sure is sensitive to tilt. A minor gravitational fluctuation sets it off.
This is great news! Just the other day, my boss discovered the worlds smallest game of pocket pool. If I bought him one of these pinball machines, he could have his own private arcade.
Where is the quarter slot?
Trolling is a art,
Solid State Electronics Laboratory for the smallest balls known to exist!
In C++, friends can touch each others private parts.
the video compares the size of the MEMS pinball to a Swedish Safetyy match, a .5mm lead and a human hair. The comparison really gives great perspective!
KARMA TAG! You're it.
Some people still do. They call them MPEGS.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
"Rows and columns of tiny nano-pinball games" That sounds like I'm hallucinating quite badly.
"Electostatic actuation" - now maybe they could drive the music for it through nano-elctrostatic speakers:
"He's a nano wizard
There's got to be a spin
A nano wizard
S'got monocrystalline"
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
And the Tony goes to:
David Spade; the world's smallest pinball wizard.
I assert that my comment is only my opinion, not that of any employer, past, present or future.
Will the Diamond Age begin in our lifetimes?
I'm personally of the opinion that when the nanotech revolution starts, it'll happen so shockingly fast that applications, society and governance will take decades to catch up -- think internet x10.
In a world of pervasive nanotech, I suspect the next really big industry will be power generation; it'll require a step up in juice unlike any seen since the start of the century. Fortunately, nanotech will hopefully solve some technical problems (superconducting power transmission, materials suited to support fusion, etc) at the same time it's demanding this huge level of power generation.
Of course, in a world of pervasive nanotech, our existing governmental and societal structures are in a lot of trouble... We live, as the ancient Chinese said, in interesting times (and I mean that in the spirit in which they did).
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Now nano sized soldiers will have equipment to perfect their hand eye coordination before they launch their attack on mankind.
You are so going to be turning off your cell phone at the gas station now!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
When I tried to watch the film, I got this javascript "error":
There seems to be a problem with your system. Browser not Microsoft Internet Explorer
That's a problem?
We'll find WMD's in Iraq as soon as we plant them there.
Berkeley has been working on mini and micro rotary engines for a little while now. Rotaries are really better for this application as they have less moving parts. Their mini rotary engine is about the size of a penny while their micro rotary engine has a rotor of size 1mm! Rotaries have no valves which makes them much easier to produce at this size.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
This would be great for furnishing the game room of the one-millionth scale model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"These micro-engines have over 300 times more energy than an ordinary battery" is meaningless. If they mean total energy delivery over whatever time period you like, then microengines can beat batteries by a factor of a million trillion zillion, as long as you hook them up to a big enough fuel tank. In actual power capacity, though, microengines aren't anything special at all, yet.
The aim is little turbines the size of a sugar cube that run from butane or propane or whatever, and have several watts of output power; prototypes of such things have been spinning for a while now. The microengines shown in the U of B release, though, are minuscule piston units which have power output in the microwatts, if that. Heck, the ones shown in the release don't even have generators attached to them, so their electrical output at the moment is zero!
For your amusement: A reader also pointed this out to me; it's a reprint of a piece on the subject from the British "Sun" tabloid, and it reads as if they took the U of B press release and put it through a Markov chain program, or something.
It's good to know that alcoholism in the press is alive and well.
And a new record for the fastest slashdotting of a University website... Insert obligatory joke about Nanoseconds here.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"These micro-engines have over 300 times more energy than an ordinary battery and are much lighter and smaller."
So a cellphone that needs a daily charging will now need a refill once a year?
I would wager that this claim carries a degree of exaggeration.
"I'm a loner Dottie, a rebel."
- Pee Wee Herman
VLC works just fine
have developed a micro-engine that will allow people to charge mobile phones using lighter fluid.
Great. Now I can add my laptop and cell phone, along with nail clippers and wooden slupting tools, to list the of things you can be detained Airport Security guards can pull me out of line and strip search me down for...
on the other hand I wonder what MacGuyver could do with one of these, a pack of toothpicks and some loose sweater yarn...
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Oh, and thank you for noting.
I've been saving this up for a moment like this:
Ever since I heard of Unix
I've always had a ball,
From Berkeley up to Linux
I must've run 'em all;
But I ain't seen nothing like him
On systems large or small
That tired, squinting, blind kid
Sure makes a mean sys call!
He sits just like a statue,
Like part of the machine,
Feeling all the limits,
Knows what signals mean,
Hacks by intuition,
His process never stalls,
That tired, squinting, blind kid
Sure makes a mean sys call!
He's a Unix Wizard,
I just can't get the gist
A Unix wizard's
Got such a mental twist.
How do you think he does it?
I don't know!
What makes him so good?
Ain't got no distractions,
Don't hear no biffs or bells,
Don't see no lights a flashin'
Ignores his sense of smell,
Patches running kernels
Dumps no core at all,
That tired, squinting, blind kid
Sure makes a mean sys call!
I thought I was
The process table king,
But I've just handed
My root password to him.
Even on my own hot boxes,
His hacks can beat my best.
The network leads him in,
And he just does the rest.
He's got crazy Finger servers
Never will seg-fault...
That tired, squinting, blind kid
Sure makes a mean sys call!
"VLC works just fine"
Indeed it does.
I also have mplayer, but I find VLC far better.
I have "installed" the Divx-codec for mac, but Quicktime seems to disregard it.
I prefer that the Divx codec is used over all that MS-mediaplayer crap. Although Xvid would even be better.
Check out this rocking piece of nanotech.
Here is a mirror of the video if you want to check it out:
pinball_720x540_(divx).avi
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
About a year ago, Popular Science did an article on nanotech motors. They said that the biggest drawback of even the best Li-batteries is that no battery has even hit the 1% efficiency rating. Reasearchers hope that with these mini-engines, we may finally see power devices as small as a battery that can produce over 1% efficiency. I believe that 10% is their ultimate goal, although anything over 1% would still be worlds better than batteries. Granted, use in such devices as portable phones would actually mean that the micro engines would just be recharging the batteries, which would limit the overall efficiency to less than a 10th of a percent, but given other applications and better technology, such nano engines could replace Li-batteries in laptops and other high performance appliances. No more plugging your laptop into the wall, just go to the gas station and filler up ;) .
I came, I saw, She conquered.
It's slashtilted...
Or how about when nanotech gets smaller then 1nm, are we going to have to the change that name too?
Given that atoms are on the order of 0.1 to 0.3 nm and given the strong limitations imposed by nuclear physics (particularly the strong force), I don't think there is much risk.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
"Lasers were once seen as the technology that would transform the world."
And they were right - they did. Not then, and not in the laser death ray way they thought back then, but now. I read a compelling article a while back (probably here) that proposed that the tech boom of the 90's was not the result of computer, the Internet or anything else. It was about lasers becomming cheap enough to be put in everything. Lasers are in millions of things. We don't even think about them - CD, DVD, fibre networks, SP/DIF..etc.
The transformations don't happen until the price point comes down. Nanotech is more like the way people think about the Internet - it starts inexspensivley from the get go (wouldn't have without those cheap lasers though). Once the first practical molecular assemblers are created (assuming they can be) it will boom very very quickly.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
The nanotech engine looks very far from production ready - two or three unclear images, and an interview, that's it. The video is mainly marketing for Birmingham Uni, AFAICS, and almost entirely void of technical details or facts.
.5 mm from the chamber wall, irrespective of the size of the chamber. The few miniature engines that have actually operated under their own power are nudging this limit and, not surprisingly, have very incomplete combustion resulting in very low efficiency and extremely polluting emissions.
Hear, Hear. Miniature engines are sexy projects for demonstrating micro-machining capabilities but they invariably disappear from the radar after the initial media flurry. The inventors are so excited about their projects that they overlook the inevitable effects of downscaling on IC engines. The most important effect is that of flame quenching at the relatively cool walls of the combustion chamber. This occurs at around
At least the folks at Berkeley did their homework. They list the following research issues:
Quenching Effect
Engine Sealing
Friction/Lubrication
Fuel Carburetion
Thermal Management
Engine Diagnostics
Ignition
Ancillary Equipment/Packaging for an Autonomous System
The first two effectively rule out anything with combustion chambers smaller than 1 mm. I'd be amazed if someone can make a working micro-engine, sadly it's just a pipe dream.