Do you have a Tesla and hate the hassle of plugging it in every day? Or do you have a product that could be shown off much better if you had an inexpensive way of delivering power to it while it is on the shelf in the grocery store? These are just a few scenarios where the eCoupled technology from Fulton Innovations could help. Just imagine driving your electric vehicle back home and start the charging cycle just by pulling into a parking spot equipped with a eCoupled charging device in the ground beneath the car. That is the convenience of the Fulton eCoupled technology.

Currently the Tesla is charging at 1600 Watts so you can expect it to be fully charged overnight just as it would be if you plugged it into the wall. The efficiency of charging electric vehicles is very good but there are plans to improve it even more in the near future.

Fulton Innovations is one of those companies who makes a ton of interesting technology and we could have spend all day with them discussing the different products they offer. Splashpower is something that we will have to discuss with them next time we meet with them. This is a way to harvest small amounts of energy from flowing water, I can just imagine the pump sinks that are popular at outdoor events using this technology to provide a small amount of light in the bowl of the sink.

Very often when you are building a project there are two discreet sections. How do we go about powering everything up? Just use some good old copper wires right? That’s a good solution when the sections are fixed together but what happens when one section is rotating, in this case we can use power slip ring connectors but that is not very elegant.

Alan Yates had this issue when he was building a rotating POV device. Getting power onto the rotating section without placing a heavy battery directly on the rotating section was a challenge. Alan has documented the steps that he took along the way for us to enjoy. To see more details be sure to check out Alan’s Wireless Power Experiments Page.

Via: EEVBlog

The Vstone/Kumotek booth at CES 2011 was lots of fun with their dancing robots entertaining the crowd. The dancing robots are being controlled using a video game like remote control. All of the actions are being manipulated using servo motors. They had a bunch of other cool things on display like the line following cars.

Jeffrey Gough from Warranty Void if Removed wanted to develop a method of printing circuit boards which was better than the current ways that a home hobbyist has available to them. He mentions the various current methods that are commonly used which are permanent marker, toner transfer, photolithography, isolation milling, UV photoplotting, laser engraving and inkjet. For his method he reverse engineered how an inkjet printer cartridge worked and made an adapter so that he could spray micro drops of molten wax out of the nozzle. The wax is sprayed onto a copper clad board, as soon as it hits the board the wax solidifies. The board with the printed wax resist is now placed in a warm etchant tank to etch away the non wax protected areas. I was thinking about what keeps the wax from melting in the warm etchant and it seems like an audience member was thinking the same thing. The answer was simple, the etchant solution is kept at a temperature slightly lower than the melting temperature of the wax.

Jeffery got the idea of printing the resist using wax after he attempted to print resist onto a flexible PCB using a thermal wax printer. I didn’t know there was such a thing but the wax transfer rolls are actually quite inexpensive. I don’t think Jeffery mentioned why he made his own instead of continuing to use the commercial printer, I am guessing the printer had a curvy paper path which allows printing onto only flexible PCBs. I wonder if it would be possible to convert a normal wax printer into one that could handle normal thickness copper clad boards, have a straight though path so that stiff boards could be sent straight though and have a method of indexing to some registration holes so that good double sided boards could be produced?

I guess even after these boards are done some drilling for vias would still be needed even if all of the parts that were used were surface mount but being able to print the resist out quickly and easily would be a great convenience.

Via: Dangerous Prototypes

We have seen the AR Drone here before. This is the quadcopter that can be flown around using the WiFi from your iPhone, iPad or an iPod Touch. The accelerometers in the Apple product are used to fly the device around, you simply tip it in the direction you would like the AR Drone to fly. The quadcopter has a sophisticated onboard processor which allows the AR Drone to maintain predictable flight. There is an ultrasonic sensor on the bottom to allow the height of the quadcopter to be easily maintained. Movement of the AR Drone is watched by a bottom facing camera, by analyzing each passing frame it can be determined how far it has flown. This is a similar technology to what is done in an optical mouse to detect in what direction and how far the mouse has been moved.

The front facing camera allows the AR Drone to be flown out of visual range, you simply watch the action on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Some of the AR Drones you see have some colored bands, these are used to allow for some fun augmented reality games where you can follow another drone and even make it look different.

Watch the video for some technical details of what is inside the AR Drone and continue watching the second half of the video for some flight action. The people flying the quadcopters are out of the crowd so it shows how easy it is to just pick up and play. I can see all sorts of extended applications beyond the fun flying aspects, just imagine the security guards that need to make long far patrols, instead of walking a mile he could just make a quick flight around to make sure nothing is wrong.

Thanks to the Parrot team for taking the time to tell us all about the AR Drone at CES 2011 in Las Vegas.

InnoVision Labs had their HoloAd unit on display at CES 2011. The 3D effect is very good and of course there are no funky glasses to wear to get the effect. The technology uses three video images projected from above. There appears to be three angled pieces of glass on the inside of the cube which is what the image gets reflected onto.

This is a follow-up to the video last week where I showed the Camera and Camcorder Tripod Mount.  Some readers sent in some emails asking how I liked the rig and what the results were like. There were lots of people who asked where I got it and where they could get one. This solution worked great for me since I could whip out a basic pattern for the shape and hole locations in 15 minutes and have it cut on the CNC machine in another 15 minutes. The issue with the design is that it is made specifically for my camera and camcorder combination. It would probably not work for many others.

At the show it worked quite well, I liked being able to kick out the legs and sit it down anywhere. It was also always ready to go at a moments notice. Having the remote mic was great since often a nice distance from the subject was too far to properly hear what they were saying. The issue with this is that I was not able to easily have a back and forth conversation since I was not on mic. I am thinking that the best solution for this in a noisy environment would be to have a single earbud for me and the person being interviewed and a lav mic on me. This way both of us can hear each other well and we are also able to talk and be heard properly.

Of course anything that is done by me would be totally low budget compared to what would be considered professional. At the show there were dozens of crews that consisted of a host, a few camera operators, a few guys with boom mics, an audio guy, lighting person and usually some other dude with a large backpack and lots of antennas (live broadcasting possibly?).