Good insight, I completely agree, because seriously, 4 million per year or whatever? come on! That's less than one medical research lab will live on in a year... jeez... That funds maybe 10 people at most plus some equipment purchases? Totally just "ok you wanna cut our funding, then we'll cut the cool stuff first".
You're right, the real world is a messy place--lots of underground transmission lines are just plopped down into a big tray and are not very accessible to just about any method that would inspect the quality of the insulation. However, with very little effort utilities can make lines more amenable to inspecting lines with this robot.
But being able to deal with pretty difficult situations is a problem for robotics, and we like tough robotics problems, so its definitely doable. I'm in the same research lab working for Prof. Mamishev as these guys, and they are definitely thinking about lots of ways to deal with the chaotic wiring problem. Things like the little spiders of Minority Report would be ideal for getting into tough spots, but who knows, maybe we'll see that sooner rather than later... stay tuned...
One guy from our lab who did a bunch of work on this is also starting his own company based on some walking robots... not sure if the company is started yet--they kind of look like spiders...
speaking of "oh god"... oh god that building is ugly... I guess at night its not so ugly, but man... anybody ever seen that thing? jeez... the eecs building is kinda funky, but at least its not "ugly"...
Whoa, so I made a big mistake there--624kilowatts, not watts... so it'd take 31.2 kiloAmps to charge at 220V--whoa not 31.2 amps! thought something seemed too good to be true...
so obviously this would need to be charged at a higher voltage... I saw the comment that others made regarding the cap using 3500V and 31Farads... that doesn't make a ton of sense to me because people will not like using such high voltages--so you will have to use a transformer to step it down to about 50V--or a ratio of 70:1--which makes me think that the core losses would be significant.
I think to be more precise you mean 5000amp-hours*. Which means you would draw 5000 amps in one hour--or about 5000/3600 amps=1.4 amps--which obviously can't be right, so the assumption about the amount of energy being used based on the cost is wrong. They give actual numbers for the ultracapacitor on other pages--doing a bit of math (shown below) I estimated the current requirement to be about 35 amps and the voltage that that ultracap uses to be around 20 volts. I was reading another page that had much more detail and it said that the ultracapacitor they were using provided 52 kilowatt-hours of energy for a 400 pound battery. Or a ratio of 285 Watt-hrs/kg--which is huge. The BoostCap 2600 has a number like 5.2 Watt-hrs/kg. So this is a big breakthru if its real. Gasoline by the way has a energy density of 14,000 Watt-hrs/kg. So my bet is still going to be on hybrids--just in the future, hybrids will get like 500 miles per gallon when using a bank of ultracaps.
So here's a summary of what I've found out about the eestors ultracaps. So the dielectric they are using in the ultracap is apparently Barium Titanate (see the patent for how they make it). I've done some research on BaTiO3 (for making some sensors) and its pretty awesome stuff. There is another similar compound BaSrTiO3 (barium strontium titanate). Both of which can have dielectric permittivities (a.k.a. dielectric constant) up to around 6000 (Brandmayr et al. in US technical report in 1965) at room temp. Yes, 6000, while most materials have around 1-10 and some are maybe up to 100--but 6000 is huge. People have been looking at that material for about 60 years now as a possible high energy density storage solution--however, its not been until the last few years that people have figured out how to make it reliably--because its highly dependent on grain size--make the ceramic at the wrong temperature and it will have a poor dielectric permittivity.
In order to create a good sized capacitor that has a huge surface area, you need to put the ceramic material into a resin of some sort so you can coat it onto a thin film and roll it up and let it get hard. When you mix the ceramic into a resin, usually that makes the dielectric permittivity go down a ton--but if you mix them with other materials--not exactly sure what they did, but if you mix in the right stuff, you can get a decent dielectric permittivity.
So how did they get such a high capacitance? If you look at the parallel plate equation, you will notice that the only non-linear term is the gap term--the distance between the plates. So you really have to work on getting the charges really really really close to each other (effectively that gap must be less than a micron, so maybe 100 nanometers). Problem with that is, then you can't go to high voltages--because if you do, you get extremely high fields (aka the breakdown field of the material)--(voltage/gap=electric field) and your capacitor arcs and dies if you use too high a voltage. Notice that with the Ultra Capacitors out there on the market that have like 2600 Farads as their capacitance, they have a very low voltage they run at--2.7 volts for instance.
The problem with running at only 2.7 volts is that energy storage is a function of the equation: U=1/2*C*V^2 --notice that V is squared!! So if you could increase the voltage just a bit you could really increase the energy--which is I'm sure what they did. So a BoostCap 2600 that uses 2.7 volts which has a capacitance of 2600 Farads would have an energy storage of 9.5 kilojoules, or about 2.6 watt-hours. These guys are claiming 52 kilowatt-hours! Which is about 20,000 times higher than what BoostCap can do.
Ok so how do they do that? Well, of course they have to have a huge capacitor first, second, higher voltage. So lets look at those variables, maybe they can explain it. The BoostCap 2600 weighs 480 grams--half a kilogram. So 400 pounds would give you 363 BoostCap 2600s. So thats a capacitance increase of 363. So now we need to increase the voltage by how much: so 20,000/363=55, so we need V^2 to be 55
The previous version of this device was pretty scary actually, although still very innovative--it would pinch down on parts of your intestine and pull it sell along like that. Needless to say, it didn't catch on, because who wants some wierd robot biting down into the walls of your colon and hopefully not doing any damage...
Because it just passed the common man's version of the Turing test. Plus a little robot carrying a beer that is as bigger than the robot itself is just cool.
Things are coming around again for the overclockers--just like the Celeron 266Mhz, overclocking to like 400 Mhz, now we are overclocking the 2.66 Ghz to 4.1 GHz... great!
actually I see this more as intel doing some padding because they are worried they won't be able to get to these high clock speeds easily anymore... so they release something that is underclocked basically, and in future versions they just clock it up a bit and sell it as a new chip for 3 times the price..
So many people really doubt Moore's law will die anytime soon. Just because intel isn't jumping MHz every year, doesn't mean its ending... There are so many things left to do to squeeze out more performance in the same area or smaller. You can go to 3D stacks of transistors, higher K oxide dielectric, the list goes on and on. I agree with the article that says that we could see it go into the 2020s... the main problem that will hinder moore's law will be the economics of investing in new fabs, and waning demand of chips, not research and technology limitations. I see more money being pumped into memory chips and special purpose ARM style chips with a focus on low power. Eventually, people will just say, "Moore's law just doesn't matter anymore, the market has changed".
Why buy the PSP?
on
IRC On The PSP
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Why buy the PSP when you can just buy the 2.5 inch LCD screen addon to the PS2:
And they are just over the horizon with their Atomic Pistols!
Saw him on BookTV on C-Span
on
The Know-It-All
·
· Score: 4, Informative
This guy is pretty funny actually. I saw him on cspan bookTV talking about his book... he is pretty nerdy sounding, but also pretty smart...
I definitely don't think reading the encylopedia set makes you smart, but I think it does make you knowledgeable in history and art because those areas often are more related to memorizing facts rather than building upon one equation after another. As such most technical areas of the EB are pretty simplistic and often a little out of date...
Man, I know it... I used the original gnutella, and man it was soooooo slowwwww... I agree... I think what somebody else said above is possibly correct that the nodes are only used to make the connections, once data starts flowing, it all goes through the normal ip routes...
That's hilarious... this brings up a good point too, which is that, interviewers are always trying to make their lives easier and lots of them google the people that are at the top of their list to see if there is anything else about the person they can find... which is why its not such a great idea to have a webpage that describes non work-friendly attitudes...
and I've also talked to people who say its actually really good to have something that really stands out on your resume... which is why I point out that I've memorized 50 decimal places of pi... what a dumb thing I decided to do in 5th grade, but I don't have much better than that... this guy would get referred to as "the jokerpimp guy", while I'm going for the "memorized pi guy"... yes yes, memorized only 50 digits of an irrational number, which of course means that pi is impossible to memorize, but HR people wouldn't care to split hairs...
What is the deal with supernodes, isn't there a peer to peer protocol that doesn't revolve around supernodes? I don't like the idea of somebody setting up a high-bandwidth machine and routing enough packets to get the entire phone call I'm making and then in their spare time decrypting my phone call.
We need a a VoIP method that uses bit torrent and duplicates what you are saying many times, which wastes bandwidth but makes up for the slowness factor. And even still, we need a bit torrent less reliant on supernodes... could a VoIP network function on a P2P network meant to work without supernodes?
Somebody know more details about what the difficulties are in making a P2P network without supernodes? (Assuming there are lots of people on the network).
I got started when my cousin, who had a TRS-80 and a 386 gave me a book called "It's Basic". I started programming on Apple II's in our classroom and then got really interested in building a computer for as cheap as possible. Well, with 512 MB hard drive and 4 megs of RAM and a 486 DX 66 MHz running only DOS 5, I ran into one problem after another trying to get everything to work. Needless to say, I learned a lot and ended up getting a job at a local internet service provider based on my experience when I was 16.
I'm going to bet practically everybody else here had a very similar beginning...:-)
It seems like they are making the thing bigger, but at the same time, suddenly they can go higher... it must mean there will be more than one engine or a much longer burning engine. It seems like if they put the same engine on the same ship they have now, they could go even higher... like for instance to the space station... I still wonder if they could ever pack enough fuel to go into orbit then have enough to deorbit so they don't have to use the heat-shield method of returning.
After looking up the paper in applied physics letters, they mentioned more properties about the material and that it is in the class of amorphous oxide conductors (which is where you dope a heavy metal oxide with something like Tin to make it conductive). In fact, this material could be used quite easily just like ITO, but it actually has a lower conductivity than ITO. What these guys did is use the ITO as a semiconductor channel not just as a conductor. The ON voltage is 5V (due to the large 3.35 eV bandgap), compared to about less than 0.5 volts for most modern VLSI devices.
The reason I mention the Japanese work is that they use multiple components molecules which apparently helps maintain the amorphous qualities of the film. In other words, I think this work is not as good as the Japanese work.
Sounds alot like the Nature Nov 25th issue which mentions another advance in indium gallium zinc oxide by a japanese group. They did theirs on a plastic substrate with an amorphous oxide.
Zinc Tin Oxide sounds alot like indium tin oxide (ITO) which is pretty commonly used, but has commonly known downsides. I don't think this is all that impressive.
Ahh, I just figured out the answer. It says that diamonds have a Negative Electron Affinity. Which means that the vacuum level is more stable than the conduction band. Once the electron is excited to the higher state equalling the difference between the bandgap (5.5 eV) and the NEA value (which is 2.4 eV on hydrogen saturated surfaces) , the electron just flies out of the material instead of becoming delocalized into the crystal. So basically what they are doing is replacing the cathode ray tube as the source of the electrons. First flat speakers, now flat tv's!, cool!
Looks like they are using Diamond Like Carbon quite often... so its a quasi-zinc-blend structure apparently.
With field emission they are generating electrons so somehow the electrons get enough energy to reach the vacuum level. I wonder how efficient this is since diamond's bandgap is something like 5.5 eV.
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Good insight, I completely agree, because seriously, 4 million per year or whatever? come on! That's less than one medical research lab will live on in a year... jeez... That funds maybe 10 people at most plus some equipment purchases? Totally just "ok you wanna cut our funding, then we'll cut the cool stuff first".
But being able to deal with pretty difficult situations is a problem for robotics, and we like tough robotics problems, so its definitely doable. I'm in the same research lab working for Prof. Mamishev as these guys, and they are definitely thinking about lots of ways to deal with the chaotic wiring problem. Things like the little spiders of Minority Report would be ideal for getting into tough spots, but who knows, maybe we'll see that sooner rather than later... stay tuned...
One guy from our lab who did a bunch of work on this is also starting his own company based on some walking robots... not sure if the company is started yet--they kind of look like spiders...
speaking of "oh god"... oh god that building is ugly... I guess at night its not so ugly, but man... anybody ever seen that thing? jeez... the eecs building is kinda funky, but at least its not "ugly"...
Whoa, so I made a big mistake there--624kilowatts, not watts... so it'd take 31.2 kiloAmps to charge at 220V--whoa not 31.2 amps! thought something seemed too good to be true...
so obviously this would need to be charged at a higher voltage... I saw the comment that others made regarding the cap using 3500V and 31Farads... that doesn't make a ton of sense to me because people will not like using such high voltages--so you will have to use a transformer to step it down to about 50V--or a ratio of 70:1--which makes me think that the core losses would be significant.
I think to be more precise you mean 5000amp-hours*. Which means you would draw 5000 amps in one hour--or about 5000/3600 amps=1.4 amps--which obviously can't be right, so the assumption about the amount of energy being used based on the cost is wrong. They give actual numbers for the ultracapacitor on other pages--doing a bit of math (shown below) I estimated the current requirement to be about 35 amps and the voltage that that ultracap uses to be around 20 volts. I was reading another page that had much more detail and it said that the ultracapacitor they were using provided 52 kilowatt-hours of energy for a 400 pound battery. Or a ratio of 285 Watt-hrs/kg--which is huge. The BoostCap 2600 has a number like 5.2 Watt-hrs/kg. So this is a big breakthru if its real. Gasoline by the way has a energy density of 14,000 Watt-hrs/kg. So my bet is still going to be on hybrids--just in the future, hybrids will get like 500 miles per gallon when using a bank of ultracaps. So here's a summary of what I've found out about the eestors ultracaps. So the dielectric they are using in the ultracap is apparently Barium Titanate (see the patent for how they make it). I've done some research on BaTiO3 (for making some sensors) and its pretty awesome stuff. There is another similar compound BaSrTiO3 (barium strontium titanate). Both of which can have dielectric permittivities (a.k.a. dielectric constant) up to around 6000 (Brandmayr et al. in US technical report in 1965) at room temp. Yes, 6000, while most materials have around 1-10 and some are maybe up to 100--but 6000 is huge. People have been looking at that material for about 60 years now as a possible high energy density storage solution--however, its not been until the last few years that people have figured out how to make it reliably--because its highly dependent on grain size--make the ceramic at the wrong temperature and it will have a poor dielectric permittivity. In order to create a good sized capacitor that has a huge surface area, you need to put the ceramic material into a resin of some sort so you can coat it onto a thin film and roll it up and let it get hard. When you mix the ceramic into a resin, usually that makes the dielectric permittivity go down a ton--but if you mix them with other materials--not exactly sure what they did, but if you mix in the right stuff, you can get a decent dielectric permittivity. So how did they get such a high capacitance? If you look at the parallel plate equation, you will notice that the only non-linear term is the gap term--the distance between the plates. So you really have to work on getting the charges really really really close to each other (effectively that gap must be less than a micron, so maybe 100 nanometers). Problem with that is, then you can't go to high voltages--because if you do, you get extremely high fields (aka the breakdown field of the material)--(voltage/gap=electric field) and your capacitor arcs and dies if you use too high a voltage. Notice that with the Ultra Capacitors out there on the market that have like 2600 Farads as their capacitance, they have a very low voltage they run at--2.7 volts for instance. The problem with running at only 2.7 volts is that energy storage is a function of the equation: U=1/2*C*V^2 --notice that V is squared!! So if you could increase the voltage just a bit you could really increase the energy--which is I'm sure what they did. So a BoostCap 2600 that uses 2.7 volts which has a capacitance of 2600 Farads would have an energy storage of 9.5 kilojoules, or about 2.6 watt-hours. These guys are claiming 52 kilowatt-hours! Which is about 20,000 times higher than what BoostCap can do. Ok so how do they do that? Well, of course they have to have a huge capacitor first, second, higher voltage. So lets look at those variables, maybe they can explain it. The BoostCap 2600 weighs 480 grams--half a kilogram. So 400 pounds would give you 363 BoostCap 2600s. So thats a capacitance increase of 363. So now we need to increase the voltage by how much: so 20,000/363=55, so we need V^2 to be 55
This leg will be one man's secret desire in "The Christmas Story 2012".
The previous version of this device was pretty scary actually, although still very innovative--it would pinch down on parts of your intestine and pull it sell along like that. Needless to say, it didn't catch on, because who wants some wierd robot biting down into the walls of your colon and hopefully not doing any damage...
Because it just passed the common man's version of the Turing test. Plus a little robot carrying a beer that is as bigger than the robot itself is just cool.
Things are coming around again for the overclockers--just like the Celeron 266Mhz, overclocking to like 400 Mhz, now we are overclocking the 2.66 Ghz to 4.1 GHz... great! actually I see this more as intel doing some padding because they are worried they won't be able to get to these high clock speeds easily anymore... so they release something that is underclocked basically, and in future versions they just clock it up a bit and sell it as a new chip for 3 times the price..
that my friend is the subject of my research :-) so yes, people are already doing that...
So many people really doubt Moore's law will die anytime soon. Just because intel isn't jumping MHz every year, doesn't mean its ending... There are so many things left to do to squeeze out more performance in the same area or smaller. You can go to 3D stacks of transistors, higher K oxide dielectric, the list goes on and on. I agree with the article that says that we could see it go into the 2020s... the main problem that will hinder moore's law will be the economics of investing in new fabs, and waning demand of chips, not research and technology limitations. I see more money being pumped into memory chips and special purpose ARM style chips with a focus on low power. Eventually, people will just say, "Moore's law just doesn't matter anymore, the market has changed".
Why buy the PSP when you can just buy the 2.5 inch LCD screen addon to the PS2:
4 070.jpg :-)
http://ak.buy.com/db_assets/large_images/070/5001
-Gabe
And they are just over the horizon with their Atomic Pistols!
I definitely don't think reading the encylopedia set makes you smart, but I think it does make you knowledgeable in history and art because those areas often are more related to memorizing facts rather than building upon one equation after another. As such most technical areas of the EB are pretty simplistic and often a little out of date...
Man, I know it... I used the original gnutella, and man it was soooooo slowwwww... I agree... I think what somebody else said above is possibly correct that the nodes are only used to make the connections, once data starts flowing, it all goes through the normal ip routes...
and I've also talked to people who say its actually really good to have something that really stands out on your resume... which is why I point out that I've memorized 50 decimal places of pi... what a dumb thing I decided to do in 5th grade, but I don't have much better than that... this guy would get referred to as "the jokerpimp guy", while I'm going for the "memorized pi guy"... yes yes, memorized only 50 digits of an irrational number, which of course means that pi is impossible to memorize, but HR people wouldn't care to split hairs...
What is the deal with supernodes, isn't there a peer to peer protocol that doesn't revolve around supernodes? I don't like the idea of somebody setting up a high-bandwidth machine and routing enough packets to get the entire phone call I'm making and then in their spare time decrypting my phone call.
We need a a VoIP method that uses bit torrent and duplicates what you are saying many times, which wastes bandwidth but makes up for the slowness factor. And even still, we need a bit torrent less reliant on supernodes... could a VoIP network function on a P2P network meant to work without supernodes?
Somebody know more details about what the difficulties are in making a P2P network without supernodes? (Assuming there are lots of people on the network).
Privacy issues?
People see surfrdood344@hotmail.com on my resume and say, "this guy means business"...
being able to have easier access to my hotmail account? priceless...
I'm going to bet practically everybody else here had a very similar beginning... :-)
Ah its cool, no problem... you got a flamebait labeling... that was good enough for me. :-)
It seems like they are making the thing bigger, but at the same time, suddenly they can go higher... it must mean there will be more than one engine or a much longer burning engine. It seems like if they put the same engine on the same ship they have now, they could go even higher... like for instance to the space station... I still wonder if they could ever pack enough fuel to go into orbit then have enough to deorbit so they don't have to use the heat-shield method of returning.
The reason I mention the Japanese work is that they use multiple components molecules which apparently helps maintain the amorphous qualities of the film. In other words, I think this work is not as good as the Japanese work.
Zinc Tin Oxide sounds alot like indium tin oxide (ITO) which is pretty commonly used, but has commonly known downsides. I don't think this is all that impressive.
Ahh, I just figured out the answer. It says that diamonds have a Negative Electron Affinity. Which means that the vacuum level is more stable than the conduction band. Once the electron is excited to the higher state equalling the difference between the bandgap (5.5 eV) and the NEA value (which is 2.4 eV on hydrogen saturated surfaces) , the electron just flies out of the material instead of becoming delocalized into the crystal. So basically what they are doing is replacing the cathode ray tube as the source of the electrons. First flat speakers, now flat tv's!, cool!
http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/pt/diamond/publicat.htm
Looks like they are using Diamond Like Carbon quite often... so its a quasi-zinc-blend structure apparently.
With field emission they are generating electrons so somehow the electrons get enough energy to reach the vacuum level. I wonder how efficient this is since diamond's bandgap is something like 5.5 eV.
-Gabe