I’m A Tricorder, Not A Doctor, Jim!

Machine learning and automated technologies are poised to disrupt employment in many industries — looking at you autonomous vehicles — and medicine is not immune to this encroachment. The Qualcomm Tricorder competition run by the X-Prize foundation has just wrapped, naming [Final Frontier Medical Devices]’s DxtER the closest thing available to Star Trek’s illustrious medical tricorder which is an oft referenced benchmark for diagnostic automation.

The competition’s objective was for teams to develop a handheld, non-invasive device that could diagnose 12 diseases and an all-clear result in 24 hours or less without any assistance. [Dynamical Biomarkers Group] took second place …read more

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Star Trek Desktop Viewer In The Palm Of Your Hand!

There’s building small computers — like the Raspberry Pi — and then there’s building small computers — like this Desktop Viewer from Star Trek.

[Monta Elkins] is using a Beetle for this project; it’s an Arduino clone, hosting the ATMega32U4 microcontroller, with a unique feature that allows you to twist connecting wires to secure them to the board. Instead, [Elkins] went with the logical choice of soldering them. For a display, he used a SPI serial OLED 128 x 64 monochrome screen which he has cycling through a number of iconic Star Trek TOS symbols and animations. The images were …read more

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