Day: April 26, 2018

Mechanisms: The Lever, It’s Everywhere

April 26, 2018 by 28 Comments

Levers are literally all around us. You body uses them to move, pick up a pen to sign your name and you’ll use mechanical advantage to make that ballpoint roll, and that can of soda doesn’t open without a cleverly designed lever.

I got onto this topic quite by accident. I was making an ornithopter and it was having trouble lifting its wings. For the uninitiated, ornithopters are machines which fly by flapping their wings. The problem was that the lever arm was too short. To be honest, as I worked I wasn’t even thinking in terms of levers, and only realized that there was one after I’d fine-tuned its length by trial and error. After that, the presence of a lever was embarrassingly obvious.

I can probably be excused for not seeing a lever right away because it wasn’t the type we most often experience. There are different classes of levers and it’s safe to say that most people aren’t even aware of this. Let’s take a closer look at these super useful, and sometimes hidden mechanisms known as levers.

Continue reading “Mechanisms: The Lever, It’s Everywhere” →

Turn Failed Prints Into Office Fun With A Paper Airplane Maker

April 26, 2018 by 11 Comments

If you’re anything like us, you feel slightly guilty when you send a job to a printer only to find that twenty pages have printed wrong. Maybe it’s a typo, maybe it’s the dreaded landscape versus portrait issue. Whatever it is, trees died for your mistake, and there’s nothing you can do about it except to recycle the waste. But first, wipe that guilt away by using this one-stroke paper airplane maker to equip the whole office for an epic air battle.

We have to admit, automated paper handling has always fascinated us. The idea that a printer can reliably (sometimes) feed individual sheets of a stack is a testament to good design, and don’t even get us started about automatic paper folding. [Jerry de Vos]’ paper airplane maker doesn’t drive the sheets through the folder — that’s up to the user. But the laser-cut plywood jig does all the dirty work of creating a paper airplane. The sheet is clipped to an arm that pulls the paper through a series of ramps and slots that force the paper gently into the five folds needed for the classic paper dart. It’s fascinating to watch, and even though everyone seems to be using it very gingerly lest the paper tear, we can see how adding some rollers and motors from a scrapped printer could entirely automate the process. Think of the fun a ream of paper could provide around the office then.

Oh, wait…

Continue reading “Turn Failed Prints Into Office Fun With A Paper Airplane Maker” →

Neural Network Names Nightshades

April 26, 2018 by 12 Comments

Neural networks are a core area of the artificial intelligence field. They can be trained on abstract data sets and be put to all manner of useful duties, like driving cars while ignoring road hazards or identifying cats in images. Recently, a biologist approached AI researcher [Janelle Shane] with a problem – could she help him name some tomatoes?

It’s a problem with a simple cause – like most people, [Darren] enjoys experimenting with tomato genetics, and thus requires a steady supply of names to designate the various varities produced in this work. It can be taxing on the feeble human brain, so a silicon-based solution is ideal.

[Janelle] decided to use the char-rnn library built by [Andrej Karpathy] to do the heavy lifting. After training it on a list of over 11,000 existing tomato varieties, the neural network was then asked to strike out on its own.

The results are truly fantastic – whether you’re partial to a Speckled Garfech or you prefer the smooth flavor of the Golden Pow, there’s a tomato to suit your tastes. When the network was retrained with additional content in the form of names of metal bands, the results get even better – it’s only a matter of time before Angels of Saucing reach a supermarket shelf near you.

On the surface, it’s a fun project with whimsical output, but fundamentally it highlights how much can be accomplished these days by standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak. Now, if you need some assistance growing your tomatoes, the machines can help there, too.