Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Wearable technology: The bra designed to shock attackers
Posted on BBC News By Fiona Graham Technology of business reporter, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22110443
"The Delhi gang rape was the trigger. But also the numbness of women - and law-makers against this social menace. It was high time we women needed a change."
The anti-rape lingerie (left) and the electronics that make it work. The team want to make the components smaller.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22110443
"The Delhi gang rape was the trigger. But also the numbness of women - and law-makers against this social menace. It was high time we women needed a change."
Manisha Mohan is an aeronautical engineering student at SRM University in the Indian city of Chennai.
She is also a young woman in a country that was thrown into chaos following the brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old student in Delhi in December, 2012.
Together with fellow students Niladhri Basu Bal and Rimpi Tripathi, she decided to use her technical skills to try and do something to help protect women like her.
After talking to women living in hostels about their experiences of harassment - called Eve-teasing in India - they developed a bra designed to deliver a 3800kv electric shock to any would-be rapist, enough to cause severe burns.
The anti-rape lingerie (left) and the electronics that make it work. The team want to make the components smaller.
The SHE (Society Harnessing Equipment) can also send a text message to a relative or friend and the local police station, with the GPS coordinates of the victim's location, says Ms Mohan.
... For more see here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22110443
Friday, April 12, 2013
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Saving E-Textiles from an E-waste Fate
Ji Sun Lee's moonlit flower project
An article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology from August discusses how the very thing that makes e-textiles interesting–the unobtrusive integration of electronics and fabric–could make them an e-waste nightmare.
What makes traditional e-waste so difficult is that it contains valuable stuff like precious metals and rare earths, but in small quantities that are hard to recycle and laced with toxins.
Enter e-textiles. Who isn’t charmed by the idea of a biking sweatshirt with built-in turn signals or accessories that could let your doctor know if your heart rate goes wacky? Not only that, but soft circuits have driven the use of electronics and microcontrollers by women and beginners through the roof.
The problem is that soft circuits contain valuable substances in even smaller concentrations than traditional electronics. Even in Europe where e-waste laws are the strongest, it’s a battle to recycle old gadgets. E-textiles as they are currently designed make it harder to classify them as either clothing or electronics, and make it harder to reclaim valuable materials like silver in conductive thread.
But the authors urge technology and fashion developers to think ahead before the problem hits the mass market. Can we use design thinking to make e-textiles out of non-toxic or biodegradable materials? Can we simplify the separation of electronic ingredients from fabric? Most importantly, how can we prevent pollution while products are still on the drawing board?
At the moment, the people who are experimenting with soft circuits and e-textiles generally aren’t thinking about the waste implications, but they should be. How can creative thinkers, designers, makers and hackers help this emerging technology become a green investment opportunity? What tools do designers need to help them design for a product’s entire lifecycle, all the way through recycling to its rebirth as a new object?
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Thursday, January 31, 2013
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
PDX Young Makers: An E-textile Design Club
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| Image from pdxyoungmakers.com |
Friday, January 4, 2013
Thursday, January 3, 2013
“The Tinkerers”: How corporations kill creativity
Excerpted with permission from "The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great"
I drove in a mild panic to the nearest Verizon Wireless store and met with a sales representative. After asking for my vitals, he typed for a few seconds and waited. Then he typed, then he waited. Then he sighed.
“You can get a new phone,” he said. “At retail price.”
“How much is that?” I asked.
“Four hundred fifty dollars.”
Could I get my current BlackBerry fixed? The rep shook his head sadly. “They don’t let us repair the phones in the store anymore,” he said.
I felt his pain. Having grown up tinkering with Radio Shack electronic kits, I used to love taking things apart—radios, tape players, anything I could get my hands on.
But in the last twenty-five years or so, the number of household devices we can easily tinker with has dwindled.
I Googled my model number to see if I could find a more affordable replacement. What I stumbled onto instead was a short video on YouTube. The video showed a pair of hands disassembling a BlackBerry and replacing the screen in a matter of minutes.
I was hooked.
Through another Google search, I found an online retailer selling replacement screens for around $45, as well as a small smartphone-specific toolkit, including a tiny torque screwdriver and a little plastic tool for prying apart the BlackBerry’s flimsy case. One FedEx delivery later, I had my phone disassembled and its parts neatly laid out on my desk.
Just ten minutes after starting the process, I powered it up. Good as new.
My tinkering journey ended at the point when I had a working phone again. But it certainly didn’t have to. Having discovered through my own persistence that this modern-age bit of machinery wasn’t quite as complicated as I had first thought, I might have been emboldened to make my own alterations to it.
Perhaps the best example of the smartphone-tinkering phenomenon is the remarkable case of George Hotz. Hotz came to fame in 2007 as a seventeen-year-old hacker of Apple’s iPhone.
Hotz, a T-Mobile subscriber, wanted to use the iPhone
with his existing phone plan. But at the time, Apple had an exclusive
deal with AT&T. Armed with nothing more than an eyeglass
screwdriver, a guitar pick, and a soldering gun, he was able to erase
his iPhone’s baseband processor, the computer chip that determined which
phone carriers the device would operate with. On his own PC, he wrote a
new string of code for his iPhone, allowing it to operate with any
wireless network. Hotz staked his claim as the first person to unlock an
iPhone. This accomplishment quickly brought him both fame and
notoriety.
Where do we draw the line between tinkerers and hackers? What role does tinkering play in contemporary society? How did tinkerers traditionally influence American industry and society? Do we still have what it takes as a nation of tinkerers to excel in the global economy?
I believe the answers to these questions lie somewhere in the tension between corporate discipline and individual ingenuity.
- – - – - – - – - – - -
The clerk’s sadness at not being able to fix things anymore, and my own sense of accomplishment at having avoided the “throw out and replace” syndrome, I think, were both symptomatic of something afoot in our culture: a return to an important tradition that has been to some extent a casualty of the remarkable efficiency with which we produce all manner of stuff. For many generations in the postindustrial age, puttering around with the mechanical devices that surrounded us was practically a rite of passage, and for many, a way of life. It tethered us to our machines and reaffirmed our notions of modern civilization. Deeply probing how things worked also provided children and adults alike with endless hours of enjoyment. It saved enterprising souls hundreds if not thousands of dollars on repair bills. It also often resulted in new and startling discoveries that sometimes led to fresh innovations.
The first gadget Steve Jobs cobbled together while still in high school with his geeky older college buddy Steve Wozniak was a “blue box” that enabled free long-distance phone calls by duplicating the appropriate digital tones. Sure, the blue box was illegal, but that didn’t stop the mismatched pair of “phone phreaks” from selling a bunch of the units to college students and other intrepid pranksters. The blue box grew out of a simple love for playing around with gadgets and making them bend to the will of a few individuals.
Jobs and Woz, who later cofounded Apple Computers, weren’t preparing for a career in hacking phone service. Rather they were engaging in the time-tested American tradition of tinkering with what was around them, and through doing so, exploring their potential for future innovation.
The word “tinkerer” had, until recently, a slightly negative connotation, suggesting individuals who are somehow aimless, lacking focus, or not sufficiently motivated to create something genuinely new. To many, “tinkering” sounds like a quaint pastime reserved for those who are retired or otherwise disengaged from the everyday process of mainstream productivity. That’s if they think of tinkerers at all. The term itself has fallen out of use, at least in the traditional sense. But historically, American tinkerers were a relatively eclectic bunch who hatched extraordinary, life-changing innovations by sheer will and forward momentum. Benjamin Franklin, Eli Whitney, Cyrus McCormick, Samuel Morse, Charles Goodyear, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers.
Then life got more complicated. It’s often assumed that somewhere in the late 1800s, at the turn of the century, tinkerers went the way of the horse and buggy. But I would argue to the contrary: America’s tinkering tradition has always been a key part of its ongoing greatness.
So what do I mean by tinkering, in contemporary terms? At its most basic level, tinkering is making something genuinely new out of the things that already surround us. Secondly, tinkering is something that happens without an initial sense of purpose, or at least with a purpose quite different from the one originally identified. Tinkering also emanates from a place of passion or obsession. Lastly, tinkering is a disruptive act in which the tinkerer pivots from history and begins a new journey that results in innovation, invention, and illumination.
Increasingly, however, American tinkering is the unlikely byproduct of a country driven by greed and conformity. Within our success as a nation and a global economy lies a paradox. The United States, with its highly disciplined approach to capitalism, invented the modern corporation and the marvelous, sleek objects it produces. Indeed, our processes have become so rationalized and efficient that we can produce new things that are cheaper than the old ones they replace. But as those wondrous corporations become bigger and more efficient, they conspire to take control of many of the outlets of our tinkering, threatening to snuff out the very creativity and brilliance that fueled the growth of those corporations.
- – - – - – - – - – - -
In August 2010, Paul Krugman published a piece in the New York Times titled “America Goes Dark.” He described how the United States, “a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System” was now dismantling its infrastructure.
Krugman’s main point was that the U.S. government was not investing stimulus funds in the tools needed for our own economic growth. Three decades of antigovernment rhetoric had convinced many Americans that spending taxpayer funds on anything was a waste of taxpayer funds. But government—the US government, specifically—had built this country into an innovative economic powerhouse by investing in “lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.”
I would take Krugman’s point one step further and argue that the American government and people helped the country grow both by investing in innovation and by committing themselves to the traditional tinkerer spirit. A sophisticated, cutting-edge infrastructure was the perfect crucible for the kind of innovation the United States embodied.
The point about the devolution of tinkering in American life is not that we have lost a physical connection to the work that we do. It’s that the notion that we can fix any problem or achieve any goal that we set for ourselves has deteriorated into a sanitized, corporatized version of what constitutes achievement.
Corporate America has grown rigid as it has grown larger. Despite the dot-com era’s many images of creative whizzes reweaving the very fabric of innovation, it remains extremely difficult for the freethinking alchemists of today to perform their peculiar strain of magic and thrive while doing it.
Modern-day American companies, especially large public companies, simply find it difficult to justify the inevitable overage of resources required to foster truly free-form tinkering. Even if they appreciate it, their investors rarely do.
Recent American history is full of examples of tinkerers who have innovated in worlds that exist only on the balance sheets of corporations or in the ether of the computer cloud. Indeed, these new-age tinkerers now outrank traditional tinkerers in both numbers and economic influence.
That is not as worrisome as some observers claim. The canard that “we don’t make anything anymore” has the ring of truth, since there is no denying that much manufacturing appears to have migrated to countries where the living wage is much lower than in the United States. But, in fact, more manufacturing still happens on American soil than in any other country on earth. United States manufacturers created around $1.7 trillion in goods in 2009, according to United Nations statistics, outproducing China by more than 40 percent. So why is there a perception that Americans are losing the manufacturing battle?
The answer is simple. The solution is complex. The simple reason for America’s continued dominance in manufacturing is that US companies have figured out how to manufacture stuff with fewer workers. Productivity due to innovation has swelled dramatically over the last thirty years. Since the middle of 1979, when manufacturing employment hit its zenith with 19.6 million workers, the US economy has shed around 8 million factory jobs. Meanwhile, American manufacturers have abandoned industries with low profit margins, such as shoes, consumer electronics, and toys, leaving emerging economies such as China and Indonesia to make many of those goods at a fraction of what they would cost here.
Tinkering is not a calling for everyone. But preserving the habitat of the tinkerer is one of the few time-proven ways we as a nation can get back on track. We can’t know the future in any way except to know that it will be different than today.
Tinkering is a state of mind as much as it is a mode of discovery. The motivations that Americans have had traditionally for creating solutions to the world’s problems are as varied as they are vivid. I suspect that what we’re really talking about is a crisis of national confidence rather than a systemic failure.
Excerpted with permission from “The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great” by Alec Foege. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2012.
Where do we draw the line between tinkerers and hackers? What role does tinkering play in contemporary society? How did tinkerers traditionally influence American industry and society? Do we still have what it takes as a nation of tinkerers to excel in the global economy?
I believe the answers to these questions lie somewhere in the tension between corporate discipline and individual ingenuity.
- – - – - – - – - – - -
The clerk’s sadness at not being able to fix things anymore, and my own sense of accomplishment at having avoided the “throw out and replace” syndrome, I think, were both symptomatic of something afoot in our culture: a return to an important tradition that has been to some extent a casualty of the remarkable efficiency with which we produce all manner of stuff. For many generations in the postindustrial age, puttering around with the mechanical devices that surrounded us was practically a rite of passage, and for many, a way of life. It tethered us to our machines and reaffirmed our notions of modern civilization. Deeply probing how things worked also provided children and adults alike with endless hours of enjoyment. It saved enterprising souls hundreds if not thousands of dollars on repair bills. It also often resulted in new and startling discoveries that sometimes led to fresh innovations.
The first gadget Steve Jobs cobbled together while still in high school with his geeky older college buddy Steve Wozniak was a “blue box” that enabled free long-distance phone calls by duplicating the appropriate digital tones. Sure, the blue box was illegal, but that didn’t stop the mismatched pair of “phone phreaks” from selling a bunch of the units to college students and other intrepid pranksters. The blue box grew out of a simple love for playing around with gadgets and making them bend to the will of a few individuals.
Jobs and Woz, who later cofounded Apple Computers, weren’t preparing for a career in hacking phone service. Rather they were engaging in the time-tested American tradition of tinkering with what was around them, and through doing so, exploring their potential for future innovation.
The word “tinkerer” had, until recently, a slightly negative connotation, suggesting individuals who are somehow aimless, lacking focus, or not sufficiently motivated to create something genuinely new. To many, “tinkering” sounds like a quaint pastime reserved for those who are retired or otherwise disengaged from the everyday process of mainstream productivity. That’s if they think of tinkerers at all. The term itself has fallen out of use, at least in the traditional sense. But historically, American tinkerers were a relatively eclectic bunch who hatched extraordinary, life-changing innovations by sheer will and forward momentum. Benjamin Franklin, Eli Whitney, Cyrus McCormick, Samuel Morse, Charles Goodyear, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers.
Then life got more complicated. It’s often assumed that somewhere in the late 1800s, at the turn of the century, tinkerers went the way of the horse and buggy. But I would argue to the contrary: America’s tinkering tradition has always been a key part of its ongoing greatness.
So what do I mean by tinkering, in contemporary terms? At its most basic level, tinkering is making something genuinely new out of the things that already surround us. Secondly, tinkering is something that happens without an initial sense of purpose, or at least with a purpose quite different from the one originally identified. Tinkering also emanates from a place of passion or obsession. Lastly, tinkering is a disruptive act in which the tinkerer pivots from history and begins a new journey that results in innovation, invention, and illumination.
Increasingly, however, American tinkering is the unlikely byproduct of a country driven by greed and conformity. Within our success as a nation and a global economy lies a paradox. The United States, with its highly disciplined approach to capitalism, invented the modern corporation and the marvelous, sleek objects it produces. Indeed, our processes have become so rationalized and efficient that we can produce new things that are cheaper than the old ones they replace. But as those wondrous corporations become bigger and more efficient, they conspire to take control of many of the outlets of our tinkering, threatening to snuff out the very creativity and brilliance that fueled the growth of those corporations.
- – - – - – - – - – - -
In August 2010, Paul Krugman published a piece in the New York Times titled “America Goes Dark.” He described how the United States, “a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System” was now dismantling its infrastructure.
Krugman’s main point was that the U.S. government was not investing stimulus funds in the tools needed for our own economic growth. Three decades of antigovernment rhetoric had convinced many Americans that spending taxpayer funds on anything was a waste of taxpayer funds. But government—the US government, specifically—had built this country into an innovative economic powerhouse by investing in “lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.”
I would take Krugman’s point one step further and argue that the American government and people helped the country grow both by investing in innovation and by committing themselves to the traditional tinkerer spirit. A sophisticated, cutting-edge infrastructure was the perfect crucible for the kind of innovation the United States embodied.
The point about the devolution of tinkering in American life is not that we have lost a physical connection to the work that we do. It’s that the notion that we can fix any problem or achieve any goal that we set for ourselves has deteriorated into a sanitized, corporatized version of what constitutes achievement.
Corporate America has grown rigid as it has grown larger. Despite the dot-com era’s many images of creative whizzes reweaving the very fabric of innovation, it remains extremely difficult for the freethinking alchemists of today to perform their peculiar strain of magic and thrive while doing it.
Modern-day American companies, especially large public companies, simply find it difficult to justify the inevitable overage of resources required to foster truly free-form tinkering. Even if they appreciate it, their investors rarely do.
Recent American history is full of examples of tinkerers who have innovated in worlds that exist only on the balance sheets of corporations or in the ether of the computer cloud. Indeed, these new-age tinkerers now outrank traditional tinkerers in both numbers and economic influence.
That is not as worrisome as some observers claim. The canard that “we don’t make anything anymore” has the ring of truth, since there is no denying that much manufacturing appears to have migrated to countries where the living wage is much lower than in the United States. But, in fact, more manufacturing still happens on American soil than in any other country on earth. United States manufacturers created around $1.7 trillion in goods in 2009, according to United Nations statistics, outproducing China by more than 40 percent. So why is there a perception that Americans are losing the manufacturing battle?
The answer is simple. The solution is complex. The simple reason for America’s continued dominance in manufacturing is that US companies have figured out how to manufacture stuff with fewer workers. Productivity due to innovation has swelled dramatically over the last thirty years. Since the middle of 1979, when manufacturing employment hit its zenith with 19.6 million workers, the US economy has shed around 8 million factory jobs. Meanwhile, American manufacturers have abandoned industries with low profit margins, such as shoes, consumer electronics, and toys, leaving emerging economies such as China and Indonesia to make many of those goods at a fraction of what they would cost here.
Tinkering is not a calling for everyone. But preserving the habitat of the tinkerer is one of the few time-proven ways we as a nation can get back on track. We can’t know the future in any way except to know that it will be different than today.
Tinkering is a state of mind as much as it is a mode of discovery. The motivations that Americans have had traditionally for creating solutions to the world’s problems are as varied as they are vivid. I suspect that what we’re really talking about is a crisis of national confidence rather than a systemic failure.
Excerpted with permission from “The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great” by Alec Foege. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2012.
Friday, December 28, 2012
With Growth Of 'Hacker Scouting,' More Kids Learn To Tinker
Kids build robots with Popsicle sticks at an
Oakland meeting of Hacker Scouts, a group that encourages young people
to create do-it-yourself crafts and electronics.
In recent months, Scoutlike groups that concentrate on technology and do-it-yourself projects have been sprouting up around the country. They're coed and, like traditional Scouting organizations, award patches to kids who master skills.
Ace Monster Toys is a hacker space in Oakland, Calif., where members share high-tech tools. Normally, grown-ups congregate there, working on electronics or woodworking projects. But two Sundays a month, the place is overrun by 50 kids and their parents for the gatherings of a group called Hacker Scouts.
The kids in Hacker Scouts are not breaking into computer networks. They make things with their hands, and at this particular meeting they are learning to solder and are building "judobots," small robots made out of wooden Popsicle sticks.
On this warm fall day, Alicia Davis, 10, is wearing a wool hat she knit herself. As her dad stands nearby, she sews an LED bracelet with conductive thread.
"I've been sewing on little felt pieces with this," Davis explains. "The battery will power the LEDs and light up. It's pretty cool."
DIY.org, a hands-on site for kids, offers merit badges for more than 40 different skills areas.
Chris Cook, one of the parents active in organizing the Hacker Scouts, serves as president of the hacker space where the Scouts meet. He says the group has expressly targeted kids between the ages of 8 to 14.
"It's old enough where they're ready to start developing skills, [but] they're not so old that they've already been set in their ways," Cook says, "and they're more interested in what their peer groups are doing."
"So, we felt it's the right kind of time to expose them to how to craft with their hands — how to take things from a computer and put them into the physical world," Cook says.
The Hacker Scouts don't wear uniforms, but soon they'll be able to earn something akin to merit badges, made by the kid-friendly DIY electronics company Adafruit Industries.
Badges range from "learn to solder," "aerial quadcopter" and "high-altitude balloon" badges to the "Dumpster-diving" badge — "for when you get dirty but get some free stuff," explains Adafruit founder Limor Fried.
The thought of a bunch of Hacker Scouts Dumpster-diving may be unsettling, but recycling and repurposing are big with hacker groups. Grace McFadden, 11, of Madison, Conn., recently repurposed juice cartons into the soles of a pair of felt slippers, earning her a "salvager badge" from DIY.org, a new website for kids.
The site awards more than 40 badges for skills ranging from bike mechanic to "special effects wizard," and has started producing how-to videos for DIY projects, like a shoebox harp made from a box, a pencil and some rubber bands.
"Right now, I really like making paper airplanes and origami," McFadden says. "I have a whole fleet of paper airplanes." She learned to make them, she says, using an app on her iPod and by looking online.
A Scouting Handbook For Young Hackers
There are now 32,000 kids registered with DIY.org, which plans to organize local clubs around the country. The website even has an animated anthem exhorting kids to "build, make, hack and grow."
The site's chief creative officer, Isaiah Saxon, says the group plans to create the digital equivalent of a Scouting handbook for mobile devices.
"We hope that people's smartphones are eventually the Swiss army knife of our movement," Saxon says. "And that you go out into the woods ... point your phone at a tree and peel it open [to] learn about the wood underneath."
Saxon also plans to offer visual guides and "amazing experiences on the fly through these powerful handheld computers," he says.
As these efforts take off online, the hacker Scout movement is also spreading around the country. Seattle now has a science-focused group called "Geek Scouts," and a couple of tribes — not troops — of "Maker Scouts" are being formed in Milwaukee and Charleston, S.C.
Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based radio reporter and podcast producer. For links to radio docs, podcasts & DIY stories, visit http://jonkalish.tumblr.com.
Adafruit to Teach Electronics Through Puppets in New Kids’ Show
By Mike Senese 12.27.12 2:02 PM
The Circuit Playground crew. Image: Adafruit
Adafruit, the kit-based electronics retailer and promoter of hobbyist engineering, is aiming to teach electronics to a younger demographic. So young that they’re enlisting the help of puppets.
Their new online show, titled Circuit Playground, will teach the essentials of electronics and circuitry to children through kid-friendly dolls with names like Cappy the Capacitor and Hans the 555 Timer Chip. Limor “Ladyada” Fried, Adafruit’s founder and chief engineer (and 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year), will host the episodes, with her team assisting with onscreen and puppeteering duties.
“We’ll have each component have a story, a song and something to do,” Fried says. “We’ll have live feeds in our factory on how things are made. It’s a little Elmo for engineering, a little Mr. Rogers for resistors and a little Sesame Street for Circuits.”
Adafruit is familiar with online broadcasts, hosting weekly “Show-and-Tell” and “Ask an Engineer” shows on Google+ and Ustream for over three years. Circuit Playground was a natural extension for them. “We saw the audience and the participants getting younger with more advanced projects, so we figured there was something there,” Fried says.
One of the first episodes will focus on robots. “ADABOT our robot muppet has a song about how robots can take pictures from mars, and be self-driving cars,” Fried explains. “We want to celebrate the fun and good parts of making things, and even tackle complex subjects like what’s ‘good’ to make — friendly robots for example.”
As a learning companion, Adafruit has also recently produced the coloring book E is for Electronics, and will carry plushie dolls of each character and an add-on for the eponymous Circuit Playground iPhone/iPad app.
Episodes will premiere this March on Google+ and Ustream. Fried holds hope for them to inspire the upcoming crop of designers and builders.
“Will there be a generation of engineers 10 years or so from now saying, ‘Hey, I became an engineer because of that crazy electronics show Circuit Playground‘? I hope so.”
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