Last year I picked up a Tandy Model 100 at the Vintage Computer Festival East for about US $90. Originally released in 1983, it was the forerunner of today’s notebook computers, featuring a good-quality keyboard and LCD display. It could run for 20 hours on four AA batteries and a month on standby. Thanks to […]
The hot, humid environment of tropical marine areas such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef can wreak havoc on the marine autonomous systems. Underwater and surface MAS are used for marine monitoring, locating objects such as mines on the seafloor, and rescuing swimmers. “Tropical conditions can cause systems to overheat or prevent high-density lithium batteries from […]
When they met at a cocktail party in 1956, George Devol and Joseph Engelberger instantly bonded over their love of science fiction, happily chatting about Isaac Asimov and his theories on robotics. Then the conversation turned more serious. Two years earlier, Devol had filed a patent for a general-purpose manipulator for performing repetitive tasks, and […]
I’ve never had an interest in pursuing game such as deer or grouse. Hunting was never my thing. But I do enjoy a good technical challenge. And I recently found a challenge that involves hunting—with downed radiosondes as the quarry. Radiosondes are instrument packages carried aloft by weather balloons. They measure atmospheric conditions up to […]
Electric vehicles are gaining in popularity around the world, especially with the high cost of fuel. But some of the current EV models aren’t a good fit for owners who can’t wait around for hours for their batteries to charge, such as taxi drivers, delivery people, and ride-hailing services. One startup trying to solve this […]
“The Jetsons” premiered on ABC on 23 September 1962. Set 100 years in the future, the animated comedy series followed the Jetson family—George and Jane and their kids, Judy and Elroy—as they went about their futurist yet surprisingly relatable lives in Orbit City, in a tech-laden house on adjustable columns, commuting by flying car and […]
The spacecraft that took men to the surface of the moon and back relied on computers that pushed the state of the art when they were built. Designed by MIT, the Apollo Guidance Computers came with 72 kilobytes of ROM and 4 kilobytes of RAM. This memory used a form of magnetic core memory, where […]
The global semiconductor shortage has made life tough for anyone using microcontrollers, with lead times now sometimes quoted in years. But there has been one bright spot: the US $4 Pi Pico, a microcontroller based on the new RP2040 chip. Not only does the RP2040 have lots of compute power, it hasn’t suffered the kind […]
Adam Grosser wants to improve transportationof people, goods, and energy. That’s why the chairman and managing partner of the early-stage venture capital fund UP Partners is investing in several mobility projects. They include Beta Technologies’ electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) urban transportation aircraft, Quincus’s operating system for supply-chain and logistics providers, and Teleo’s teleoperation platform for mining, […]
It was an idea born of frustration, or at least that’s how Charles Babbage would later recall the events of the summer of 1821. That fateful summer, Babbage and his friend and fellow mathematician John Herschel were in England editing astronomical tables. Both men were founding members of the Royal Astronomical Society, but editing astronomical […]