Monthly Archives: October 2016

Rolly: Rollup Your Keyboards

Anyone who has typed on a touchscreen with his or her thumbs can certify that it gets rather tiring after sometime – especially if you have to hold the smartphone also. At such times, one wishes they had a regular keyboard to allow the use of other fingers also to aid the thumbs. Although a number of keyboards are available, which are small enough to fit easily in the pocket along with the smartphone, LG’s Rolly Keyboard is unique – you can roll and fold it.

LG is coming to the market with an innovatively designed product, the first wireless portable solid keyboard of the industry, which is also roll able. LG’s Rolly Keyboard can easily fit in your pocket, purse or briefcase. It also has two arms that fold out to support your tablet or smartphone, leaving all your fingers free for typing.

Although roll able keyboards are not new in the market, most of these silicone gadgets feel more like an extension of the onscreen keyboard. Their tactile feedback is entirely different from the real feel of a desktop keyboard. That has also led to keyboards with origami-like designs to fit into your pocket. However, LG has managed to combine the feel of a real keyboard with the flexibility of rolling it up.

LG’s Rolly Keyboard, model KBB-700, is made from impact-resistant polycarbonate and ABS plastic. When spread out for use, four rows of keys become visible along with an elongated rectangular box sitting at the top of the keyboard. Inside the box are the two arms that fold out to hold your tablet or smartphone. The box also holds the single AAA battery for powering the keyboard for over three months of normal use. When not in use, the four rows of keys roll up around the rectangular box to form a stick. You can carry the stick easily in your pocket or purse.

Rolly Keyboard uses Bluetooth 3.0 to connect wirelessly to mobile devices. You only have to unroll the keyboard to activate it. Once paired up, any subsequent pairing function works automatically with a specific device. Additionally, you can pair up the keyboard with two devices at a time. A single button press allows you to switch over the keyboard to the other device. Rolly can be powered down simply by rolling it up. The keyboard then forms a stick, making it portable and easy to carry.

Although a portable device, Rolly has a pitch of 17 mm. This, according to LG, is very close to the 18 mm pitch for a desktop keyboard. Pitch being the distance between the centers of any two neighboring keys. That makes typing on Rolly as comfortable as typing on a real desktop keyboard. Additionally, Rolly offers the same tactile feeling as does the desktop keyboard when pressing keys on it. They markings on the Rolly keyboard are high-contrast type and therefore, readability is not an issue.

With Rolly, users can forget the onscreen keyboard on their smartphone. They can keep their smartphone on Rolly’s arms just as they would place a monitor in front of a desktop keyboard. That makes typing on smartphones much simpler than having to use the cramped up keyboard on the screen.

WD PiDrive for the Raspberry Pi

Most users of the RBPi (Raspberry Pi) prefer to use the single board computer for small and simple tasks suited for their low powered hardware. It is also possible for RBPi users to upgrade their hardware for augmenting functions that need more power. For example, users looking for additional memory space can use traditional SD Cards and USB drives. Now, Western Digital is upping the ante with their PiDrive, a one terabyte hard drive, compatible to the RBPi.

PiDrive is somewhat different from the average storage drive commonly seen in desktops and laptops. In place of the usual SATA interface that comes with a typical hard drive, PiDrive employs a USB 3.0 header, modified for the purpose. That means you can connect the drive to the USB port of the RBPi. However, PiDrive goes a step further. You can connect it to the power port on your SBC. The advantage is that you can now power both the RBPi and the PiDrive from the same source, using a single cable.

Since the SBC RBPi cannot boot from any source other than its microSD card, the WD PiDrive also has a built in 4GB microSD card. You can place an operating system on the card, so that the RBPi can boot from it. WD PiDrive is compatible to both RBPi Model B+ and RBPi 2 Model B.

PiDrive consists of a WD Passport drive with a built-in USB controller in place of the usual SATA interface and comes without any plastic enclosure. Earlier also, others have already toyed with the idea of an RBPi that can boot from and store information to a hoard drive. However, most such ventures needed a powered USB hub to transfer power to the drive. WD has removed the need for the USB hub, making the newly equipped RBPi much neater.

The 1TB PiDrive is available in the form of a kit. Along with the 2.5-inch USB hard disk drive, the kit consists of a 5V power adapter, a USB Micro B to Type A power cord, a WD PiDrive cable and a Class4 4GB microSD card with an SD adapter. However, the star attraction of the kit is the WD PiDrive cable. This specially designed cable supplies the necessary power to the PiDrive and the RBPi at the same time. The included power adapter has adequate capacity to handle the power required by both the SBC and the drive. WD provides a Quick Install Guide for making all the connections easily and correctly.

The microSD card with the PiDrive ships blank and you can install another operating system on it safely, without compromising the existing SD card of your RBPi. That means you can test another OS without losing the files or programs on the original SD card.

To use the WD PiDrive with the RBPi for the first time, you will need to partition it, format the partitions and mount them. You can also store your OS on the drive. For that, you must let the boot loader remain on the SD card, writing only the OS on the PiDrive. The WD Labs Community offers detailed instructions for doing this.

Volumio: Control Your Hi-Fi through a Raspberry Pi

Traditionally, amplifiers connect to loudspeakers through wires. The wires carry the electric currents that make the loudspeakers work to produce sound. So far, wires were also necessary to feed amplifiers from different sources such as CD players, TV sets and others. By placing amplifiers within the speaker enclosure, part of the ugly wiring was taken care, but the wires from the source persisted until wireless methods were discovered.

Introduction of the Walkman and other portable players changed the music scenario forever, bringing it out of the living room and allowing people to carry their music with them. However, there was a limit to the number of songs one could carry on their person. The advent of the smartphones and the Internet opened another door. People could stream music over the net, leaving their collection at home. This was the age of iTunes, Spotify and Beats Music, facilitating listening to music wherever you may be.

Most often, these new methods prove expensive for those on a budget, and they are forced to bypass the newer ways of consuming music. An RBPi (Raspberry Pi) is a great help in these cases, simply because the single board computer is affordable, flexible and of a convenient size. Its flexibility makes it a perfect fit for use as a home audio solution and you can control your music wirelessly without having to invest in expensive high-fidelity stuff.

An RBPi gives you many modes of selecting songs to play and the manner in which they are played. For this, the RBPi uses a specially tailored Operating System by the name of Volumio. The major attraction is the nice and simple cross-platform web interface through which you can control music.

The RBPi sits as a controller just in front of the amplifier. It can pick up songs from a USB stick plugged into one of the USB sockets, select it from your local home NAS or take your picking from Web Radio. For the last part, you will need a Wi-Fi dongle to connect the RBPi to the Internet.

Volumio is easy to set up, as not much of advanced functions or graphics are to be handled. Simply download the Volumio disk image, transfer it to your microSD card and use it to boot up the RBPi. You will not require a keyboard, mouse or monitor to set up the software, as the entire configuration is possible through the web interface of Volumio.

Use your computer to connect to Volumio. You can find it by connecting your computer to the same network where you have your RBPi plugged in. You may also use Volumio over a wireless network, for which, you will have to first connect to the RBPi via Ethernet to configure its settings for use with a Wi-Fi dongle. This also allows you to control the software with the browser on your smartphone – simply type in the URL ‘http://volumio.local’ in your browser.

Using the RBPi makes it simple to select songs and set up other parameters for playing them on your home Hi-Fi system. As an advanced arrangement, this is affordable and one can easily modify it to suit specific needs.

Let Spinpod & Hobie Hold Your Smartphone

Smartphones are getting smarter all the time and their camera functions are improving too. With 13MP+ cameras becoming common in phones, it is possible for anyone to capture stunning photographs. The only requirement to get those shots just right is to have steady hands – especially with panoramic shots. However, gadgets such as the Spinpod and Hobie are now available to take care of that. These are portable motion control unit making it easier to create panoramas. At the same time, you do not have to spin on the spot holding your smartphone.

Independent time-lapse panoramas

You can use the Spinpod for shooting motion time-lapse videos. A simple device with a rotating dock holds your smartphone in the proper position, while allowing it to rotate with a continuous motion. The rotation is smooth and you control the pace, which means there are no more overlaps, disruptive seams and lost pixels, all so usual with handheld panoramas.

Although the slot is 64×13 mm, it fits most Apple and Android phones and a thumb-wheel locks the phone in position. Smaller or larger phones can also be fitted with adapters. Users can use these adapters for holding their smartphones horizontally also. After the device is locked in position, controlling the Spinpod is simple, as it has capacitive touch buttons and LED indicators.

For shooting difficult panoramas, you can delay the start of rotation by 5, 10 or 15 seconds. That gives you ample time to place the Spinpod in its proper position to start the panoramic selfie. In the time-lapse mode, you can set the device to rotate in steps of 0.5, 1, 2, 5 or 10-second intervals. The re-chargeable battery can last for 10 hours of panoramic shoots or 100 hours of time-lapse photography.

Tilted time-lapse photography

However, when you want to tilt your smartphone at any angle for the panoramic shot, you will have to use the Hobie. Looking more like a modified kitchen timer, Hobie is a smartphone-holding gadget that allows users to capture panning time-lapse photos at almost any angle.

According to Mattia Ciuccaiarelli, the designer of Hobie, using a kitchen timer for time-lapse photography is like giving an existing product a new life. However, Hobie does include some clever features and functionalities.

Hobie comes across as a large static wheel mounted atop a kitchen timer. The wheel holds a crossbar with bungees that can rotate 360 degrees. You use the bungees to secure your smartphone (8 cm and below only) in place – that means, no phablets. The rotating crossbar allows the smartphone to be angled in almost any angle, overcoming the limitations of products such as the Spinpod.

As the timer operates on its wind-up mechanism, no batteries or charging are involved. However, you cannot alter the speed of rotation – it always takes 15 minutes to turn 90-degrees. With Hobie on the kitchen timer, you can take still pictures or moving time lapses.

Hobie is a simple, cheap and portable means of capturing time lapses and panoramas with a smartphone. Expect it to start shipping this November.

Farming With Drones & Robots

According to Heidi Johnson, crops and soil agent for Dane County, Wisconsin, “Farmers are the ultimate “innovative tinkerers”.” Farming, through the ages, has undergone vast changes. Although in developing worlds, you will still find stereotype farmers planting his seeds and praying for rain and good weather while waiting for his crops to grow, farm technology has progressed. Therefore, we now have twenty-four hour farming and driverless combines and autonomous tractors have moved out of agro-science fiction. Farmers now are good at developing things that are close to what they need.

For example, the Farm Tech Days Show has farmers discussing technology ranging from the latest sensors to cloud processing for optimizing their yield and robotics that can improve manual tasks. Most farmers are already aware of data analytics, cloud services, molecular science, robotics, drones and climate change among other technological jargon. The latest buzz in the agricultural sector is about managing farms that are not a single field, but distributed in multiple small units. This requires advanced mapping and GPS for tailoring daily activities such as the amount of water and fertilizer that each plant needs.

That naturally leads to observation, measurements and responding in real time. Because such precision farming means technological backup, with data being the crux of the issue to respond to what is actually happening in the field. A farmer would always like to know when his plants are suffering and the cause of their suffering.

For example, farmers want sensors that can tell them about the nutrient levels in the soil at a more granular level – potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen, etc. They also want to know how fast the plant is taking up such nutrients – the flow rate. This information must come in real time from sensors and there must be diagnostic tools to make sense of the data.

Although NIFA, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture were talking about the Internet of Ag Things, the concept is not new to farmers. In fact, farmers are already collecting information from both air and ground. They are doing this by flying drones, inserting moisture sensors into ground and placing crop sensors in machines when spraying and applying fertilizers.

Presently, what farmers are lacking is a cost effective, adequate broadband connection. Although Internet connectivity exists even in remote areas, thanks to satellite linkages, these are not cost effective to the farmer, as they have to deal with increasing amounts of data flow.

The current method farmers use is to collect data from the field on an SD card or thumb drive and plug it into their home computers. They transfer this data for analysis to services where crop consultants or co-operative experts are available. The entire process of turnaround takes a few days.

What farmers need is end-node farming equipment with the necessary computing power. This could help with processing and editing the raw data and sending only the relevant part direct to a cloud service. This requires an automated process and a real-time operation. With farms getting bigger, farmers need to cover much more acreage, while dealing with labor shortage and boosting yields in their farms.

Superconductivity Temperatures Get Higher

Superconductors have the capability and the potential to revolutionize our lives through improved technology. That includes superior thermal conductivity, remarkable magnetic properties and nearly zero electrical resistance. However, all that is only possible at cryogenic temperatures, that is, at temperatures in the region of absolute zero, at -273°C or -459°F.

Researchers at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Max Plank Institute for Chemistry are working on material, which will work as superconductors equally well at room temperature. They have developed a record high-temperature superconductor, but it smells like rotten eggs.

Although superconductors are useful in all aspects of life – from fusion reactors to MRI scanners, the major deterrent is they work below -234°C or -389°F, which rather limits their application. Although all engineers want is superconductors that work at room temperatures, until now, the best they had is cuprates or copper oxide ceramics working under normal pressures at -140°C (-220°F) or under high pressures at -109°C (-164°F).

The team led by the Max Plank Institute is using H2S or Hydrogen Sulphide as the new record-holder. Although a colorless gas, H2S is usually associated with the smell emanating from rotten eggs. The team has found that H2S, when cooled and subjected to high pressures, acts like a superconductor. The super high-pressure chamber consists of a cryogenic cell of dimensions one-cubic centimeter placed between two flat-faced diamonds.

The super-cooled liquefied hydrogen sulphide placed in the cryogenic cell is subjected to high pressure by squeezing the two diamond faces together. As the pressure reaches 1.5 megabars, the super-cooled liquid H2S becomes a superconductor. This happens at a record new high temperature of -70°C or -94°F.

Scientists placed electrodes in one of two identical cells to measure the electrical resistance and magnetic sensors in the other to measure the magnetic response of the super-cooled liquid. With this arrangement, they were able to arrive at the exact combination of pressure and temperature that caused the liquid to transition to superconductivity.

According to the team, H2S under pressure transforms to H3S, which contributes to the superconductivity. They explained the relatively high temperature of the superconductor to be mainly because of the presence of hydrogen atoms in the compound. Among all elements, hydrogen has the highest frequency of oscillations. As the gas solidifies under high pressure, it causes crystal lattices to form with strong atomic bonds in the molecule, transforming the gas to solid H3S.

The team is now setting their sights to producing superconductors with still higher transition temperatures. In their opinion, this will mean increasing the pressure to at least twice that used in their current experiment. That may also mean they will no longer be able to use H2S and instead have to use other substances such as pure hydrogen or compounds such as hydrogen rich polymers. With the latter, superconductivity may be possible at high temperatures but without the accompanying necessity for high pressure.

Head of the working group, Mikhael Eremets feels that other material may have a lot of potential for performing as conventional superconductors at high temperatures. While theoretically, there is no limit for conventional superconductors to achieve transition temperatures, the experiments conducted by the team give adequate reasons to hope that superconductivity at room temperatures can be a reality.