Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: 3D printing – Page 53

As we enter our third decade in the 21st century, it seems appropriate to reflect on the ways technology developed and note the breakthroughs that were achieved in the last 10 years.

The 2010s saw IBM’s Watson win a game of Jeopardy, ushering in mainstream awareness of machine learning, along with DeepMind’s AlphaGO becoming the world’s Go champion. It was the decade that industrial tools like drones, 3D printers, genetic sequencing, and virtual reality (VR) all became consumer products. And it was a decade in which some alarming trends related to surveillance, targeted misinformation, and deepfakes came online.

For better or worse, the past decade was a breathtaking era in human history in which the idea of exponential growth in information technologies powered by computation became a mainstream concept.

Read more | >

Is a low-cost Israeli #ventilator the key to saving #coronavirus patients in #Iran, Africa and more?

“We are not talking about a website for the general public, we are talking about engineers and other experts, and we know the groups who are working on it because they are in touch with us via WhatsApp and emails, to ask questions and understand how to proceed,” he said.

“AmboVent” is a device inspired by the bag-valve mask ventilators that paramedics use when they’re manually ventilating patients in an ambulance, which also offers controls for respiration rate, volume, and maximum peak pressure. Organizations involved in its development include the Magen David Adom, Israeli Air Force 108 Electronics Depot; physicians from Hadassah and Tel Aviv Sourasky medical centers; Microsoft; Rafael, an Israeli defense contractor; Israeli Aerospace Industries; and mentors and students from FIRST Israel, a student robotics organization.

A key feature of the project is that not only the technology is opensource, but its components can be easily built with limited tools and parts, for example 3D printers and car pieces, making the production much more accessible even in less developed country.

Continue reading “Coronavirus: Israeli researchers design low-cost open-source ventilator” | >

Designer Babies

Xenobots, which were first brought to life back in January, can’t reproduce. Instead, computer scientists program them in a virtual environment and then 3D print their creations out of embryonic cells.

“We are witnessing almost the birth of a new discipline of synthetic organisms,” Columbia University roboticist Hod Lipson, who was not part of the research team, told the NYT. “I don’t know if that’s robotics, or zoology or something else.”

Read more | >

The 19 3D-printable parts that make up the mask are visible on the Maker Mask website along with details on materials needed, download instructions, videos, the ability to donate to the cause and more. The cost of each finished mask, printed in about three hours, is estimated to be between $2 and $3.

A technology veteran and a 3D-printing “savant” have teamed with other members of industry, health care and government to launch Maker Mask, a Seattle nonprofit creating medically endorsed, reusable protective masks using everyday 3D printers.

Jonathan Roberts, founder and partner at the Bellevue, Wash.-based venture capital firm Ignition Partners, is also a co-founder of RPrime, a nonprofit that is helping to fund the mask-making initiative. The former Microsoft executive said the goal is to address critical supply shortages and support “the real heroes on the front lines” of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Continue reading “Maker Mask launches in Seattle using 3D-printing technology to produce protective gear” | >

If you’ve never heard of a tensegrity structure, you should stop now and watch the video below. In it, [The Action Lab] shows a 3D printed table that is held up only with strings. We didn’t say suspended by strings but held up. Or so it appears. The model is from Thingiverse, but it is one of those things you have to see to believe.

The basic idea is pretty simple. Strings have a lot of tensile strength but collapse under the slightest compressive force. The arrangement of strings puts the force on the center string which is essentially hanging — the force is pulling the string down. The other three strings aren’t just for show, though, they keep the structure from tipping over in any one direction.

There are actually real-life examples of these kinds of structures. The video shows the Skylon at the Festival of Britain as one example and an Australian bridge. The video also makes the point that the human body uses tensegrity, since tendons are very similar to the strings in the model.

Read more | >

When you’re a software and hardware engineer sometimes you need a little challenge. Engineer Robert Lucian Chiriac’s latest Raspberry Pi creation can detect license plates and read the characters with fairly decent accuracy. This is an involved project that relies on machine learning to properly interpret images from the camera into discernible text.

The primary license plate reading function is constructed using three separate applications (there are more used throughout the project, but these three are critical). Chiriac used the YOLOv3 object detection algorithm to create a bounding box around each license plate it detects from the camera input. The image within the bounding box is sent to CRAFT, a text detecting application. Once the location for each character in the plate has been identified, the information is passed along to CRNN to predict the actual text.

Chiriac mounted the Raspberry Pi, GPS module, 4G module and Pi camera to his car’s rear-view mirror with a 3D-printed unit he designed. The Pi camera is even adjustable with a ball-joint swivel mount.

Read more | >