Tag Archives: MIT

Umbrella Drones — Jellyfish Of The Sky

Posted on by

Mount an umbrella to a drone and there you go, you have a flying umbrella. When [Alan Kwan] tried to do just that he found it wasn’t quite so simple. The result, once he’d worked it out though, is haunting. You get an uneasy feeling like you’re underwater watching jellyfish floating around you.

A grad student in MIT’s ACT (Art, Culture and Technology) program, [Alan’s] idea was to produce a synesthesia-like result in the viewer by having an inanimate object, an umbrella, appear as an animate object, a floating jellyfish. He first tried simply attaching the umbrella to an off-the-shelf …read more

Continue reading Umbrella Drones — Jellyfish Of The Sky→

3D Printed Nozzles Turbocharge Microsphere Production

Posted on by

Researchers at MIT have used 3D printing to open the door to low-cost, scalable, and consistent generation of microencapsulated particles, at a fraction of the time and cost usually required. Microencapsulation is the process of encasing particles of one material (a core) within another material (a shell) and has applications in pharmaceuticals, self-healing materials, and dye-based solar cells, among others. But the main problem with the process was that it was that it was slow and didn’t scale, and it was therefore expensive and limited to high-value applications only. With some smart design and stereolithography (SLA) 3D printing, that changed.  …read more

Continue reading 3D Printed Nozzles Turbocharge Microsphere Production→

Robots With 3D Printed Shock Absorbing Skin

Posted on by

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, CSAIL, put out a paper recently about an interesting advance in 3D printing. Naturally, being the computer science and AI lab the paper had a robotic bend to it. In summary, they can 3D print a robot with a rubber skin of arbitrarily varying stiffness. The end goal? Shock absorbing skin!

They modified an Objet printer to print simultaneously using three materials. One is a UV curing solid. One is a UV curing rubber, and the other is an unreactive liquid. By carefully depositing these in a pattern they can print a material …read more

Continue reading Robots With 3D Printed Shock Absorbing Skin→

EFF: NSA’s Support of Encryption ‘Disingenuous’

Posted on by

Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s Executive Director, called the NSA’s support of strong encryption disingenuous during a cybersecurity conference panel Wednesday. Continue reading EFF: NSA’s Support of Encryption ‘Disingenuous’→

Bring Doping, Mirofluidics, Photovoltaics, and More Into the Home

Posted on by

Can you make a spectrometer for your home lab all from materials you have sitting around? We might not believe it from a less credible source, but this MIT course does indeed build a spectrometer from foam board using two razor blades as the silt cover and a writable CD as the diffraction grating. The coolest part is removing the metal backing of the CD.

Hackaday reader [gratian] tipped us off about the course available from MIT courseware called Nanomaker. It boils down some fairly complicated experiments to the kind one can do in the home lab without involving thousands …read more

Continue reading Bring Doping, Mirofluidics, Photovoltaics, and More Into the Home→

Rita’s Dolls Probably Live Better Than You Do

Posted on by

If it wasn’t for the weird Dutch-Norwegian techno you’d presumably have to listen to forever, [Gianni B.]’s doll house for his daughter, [Rita] makes living in a Barbie World seem like a worthwhile endeavor. True to modern form, it’s got LED lighting. It’s got IoT. It’s got an app and an elevator. It even has a tiny, working, miniature television.

It all started with a Christmas wish. [Rita] could no longer stand to bear the thought of her Barbie dolls living a homeless lifestyle on her floor, begging passing toys for enough monopoly money to buy a sock to sleep …read more

Continue reading Rita’s Dolls Probably Live Better Than You Do→